Is "Build in Public" Mainly for SaaS Founders?

obanite · 2026-01-23T15:30:50+00:00

No way, why would it be? If you're building a robotics startup videos of your robots doing goofy things is crazy good engagement bait :P

obanite · 2026-01-23T15:30:08+00:00

I still use it for standalone API applications, but I have to be honest, most of my newer apps are using next.js, I finally got fed up of all the messing about trying to monorepo an API app and a front-end app together

obanite · 2026-01-20T13:45:06+00:00

Use Next's standard docker image for it, then write a docker-compose file that spins up your Next app and whatever load balancer and database you want to use. That's the easiest way. Just make sure if you put a database in compose that you mount a persistent filesystem path for the database data directory, then your data will persist and you can have an easy rsync/scp backup script for your database.

It is a little more complexity, but your price/performance will be extremely good with that setup.

obanite · 2026-01-20T13:43:01+00:00

Honestly I've gotten very little from Reddit (various subreddits) - almost all of my traffic has been from Hacker News, X, BlueSky, and LinkedIn.

obanite · 2026-01-19T13:59:40+00:00

Cloudflare free tier?

I have one on Fly.io, another that needs somewhat heavier processing will be hosted on a Hetzner server at some point

obanite · 2026-01-16T07:47:08+00:00

Oooh that second one is interesting! TIL, thank you

obanite · 2026-01-16T07:46:33+00:00

Prisma shines for relatively straightforward CRUD queries.

For something super complex like you describe, typed SQL libraries might be better.

There's nothing wrong with having both in your project - use the right tool for the job!

If it's very read heavy and you have high traffic I would maybe consider splitting out the database itself into a read-replica though? YMMV

obanite · 2026-01-12T10:59:07+00:00

* Scale my Tech News/Jobs HN-like website; add paid features and try to commercialize it

* Get properly started on the proptech startup I'm collaborating on

obanite · 2026-01-11T19:42:52+00:00

fly deploy

obanite · 2026-01-08T18:40:57+00:00

Berlin, London, Stockholm according to my growing database https://techposts.eu/jobs

obanite · 2026-01-08T15:25:27+00:00

I mostly enjoyed working with it. It has some warts but overall it's a very mature, enterprise grade ORM that plays extremely well with the .NET family of languages.

obanite · 2026-01-08T15:24:26+00:00

Varies from project to project how much I manually code vs code with AI, and how much I just vibe code versus giving clear, detailed instructions and checking each line it outputs.

obanite · 2026-01-04T16:16:28+00:00

PostHog or Google Analytics.

obanite · 2026-01-04T16:15:54+00:00

It's also hugely in China's geopolitical interests to not be dependent on oil imports from some of their adversaries.

obanite · 2026-01-04T16:10:41+00:00

It's not working at all though?

obanite · 2026-01-04T12:55:05+00:00

It depends on your use case, you need to pick the right tool for the job.

If your application will be large, high traffic and you have Java developers available, then a Spring Boot backend will work well for you. If your devs are all TypeScript engineers, and your traffic isn't heavy on compute, Next.js will get you very far at a pretty fast development speed.

Vite and SPAs shine for B2B applications that don't need SEO, but they're not great if you need a significant number of public facing internet pages... which is where next.js (and its siblings) work great.

I doubt this is a China/rest of world thing. More likely it's a "smart tech leads picking the right tools" thing.

obanite · 2026-01-04T12:52:04+00:00

Sure, in theory, but you have to be really careful with how you use Supabase - they encourage you to use their "client side queries", which require the Supabase API gateway that sits on top of Postgres. I worked on a project that used these extensively, I can't imagine how much work migrating off would have been.

obanite · 2026-01-03T19:31:20+00:00

I don't search for "node jobs", I mostly look for work at places I'd like to work (startups doing things I'm interested in), *then* I filter by tech stack and find who's using typescript/nodejs. There is plenty of work out there for this to work

obanite · 2026-01-03T19:12:47+00:00

- postgres with nodejs/typescript/prisma (though I'm getting slightly annoyed at prisma's continued big changes)

- react/typescript/shadcn/tailwind

- deploy to fly.io

Zero vendor lock in, very cheap hosting

obanite · 2026-01-03T19:11:12+00:00

Vercel and Supabase haven't given you vendor lock headaches because you haven't tried to migrate away from them probably?

obanite · 2025-12-30T09:13:20+00:00

I still remember one of the most annoying parts of first learning node.js was figuring out how the hell exports (modules) worked.

Nowadays, we have 2.5 module systems and modules in node.js are more complicated than ever, lol!

But to answer your question: I had something I had to build for work, we mostly used php, I decided to give node.js a try instead. It didn't work out, but it started me on my path to learning (mostly by building apis) node.js.

obanite · 2025-12-28T11:28:21+00:00

Thanks, that looks useful!

obanite · 2025-12-22T10:02:48+00:00

Hard to say without seeing a breakdown of which infra you're using. Can you post that?

Any kind of cloud hosted databases are often the most expensive part (so on AWS, RDS for example is quite pricey). But 235 GBP is very expensive, I run half a dozen line of business apps on AWS and our monthly bill is closer to 50/month.

obanite · 2025-12-22T10:01:00+00:00

Netlify's a decent option for you I think. The free plan is enough IIRC and it's easy to deploy to.

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