020 — Keeping Momentum

Hey. How's it going? This is Ryan Hefner, and this is the All Play podcast. So this week well, this week, this episode. I've I say this most weeks.

I think I'm gonna do multiple episodes, but really, the reality is, probably just gonna do one. I definitely could probably do more, but, you know, it's Wednesday at 4:30 AM. I just got done taking the dog outside, and then I was laying in bed and realized that I got a lot of stuff to do. You know? And my head wasn't letting me go back to sleep, so I was like, well, might as well just wake up and start getting at it.

And while I was doing that, I was just thinking about all the stuff. You know, as the as the mind does, it was racing at night, and I was thinking about all the stuff I had to get done. So with that, keeping momentum is really tough. You know? I mean, I guess I can only really speak from my own perspective, but being a software developer, your job is, you know, depend I guess, depending on what projects you're on or whatever, your job is pretty much like banging your head against a wall until you get their eureka moment, you know, and solve, like, whatever the the technical issue is or or, you know, making the proper long term decision based off of, you know, maybe limited knowledge or or rather short term knowledge and hoping that that plays out later on down the road.

And then if not, having to, you know, figure out ways to course correct, when it doesn't. So, yeah, keeping momentum is just really tough. I mean, the some of the client project stuff that I'm working on I mean, most of my stuff is going okay. There's just inherently, you just run into these challenges where you're just like, man, how am I gonna figure this out? You know, how am I gonna take, like, these randomly named files and then try to cross reference them with existing things and somehow magically pair them up through some script and upload those to some CDN provider and swap out, you know, those, those files being, like, relationally mapped, you know, to another entity or something like that.

That's just a for instance, which is one of the things that's racing through my head right now. On the personal front, you know, I I've, you know, I've stated before. I've been kinda going back and forth on stacks. And, with that, I've been trying to, like, evaluate different, you know, like, hosting providers because I'm just not a DevOps person. I've never done it.

I mean, I've done it enough just to to to get stuff live, but, my knowledge isn't really deep there, and nor do I really want my knowledge to be deep there. I just wanna pay someone to do it, but at the same time, I don't have infinite cash to just fork over to services where, the money invested isn't really necessarily being, like, reciprocated, or I'm not basically making money off of the money being invested. So I don't know. I mean, I've been there's a a period like, I think Vercel is actually a kind of an amazing, product because I think they do mask some of the complexities of spinning out stuff. I was just I was trying to do a little test on render.

I'm basically, like, dual publishing to both render and Vercel. Obviously, Vercel has no issues, spinning up like a a next step and doing the doing the build process. But for whatever reason on render, that same app, obviously, I'm just on one of their free little dynos. So I I'm I'm sure I could probably fix this by just paying the $7 or $14 or whatever it's gonna be to get it to work, but it's I maxed out the memory just building the app, you know, the 5 12 megabytes of RAM. It's like, okay.

Well, that doesn't give me much confidence in the service. The fact that I can't just, like, generate a static, website via their build script. And then also running into similar kind of, like, issues even just getting a nest, like, web service a you know, basically, an express app, you know, but it's it's using Nest JS, for the that's the framework. And then just running into things where, you know, it's failing to build because I don't I have to pay to run the, you know, the the post build predeploy hook, command so that way I can actually, like, spin up the Prisma instance on the server and stuff. And great.

Like I said, I'm like, I'm I'm not unwilling to pay, but at the same time, I guess I I lose a little faith in a service when I can't even just, like, spin up the static Next. Js, app. And it's like, well, do I really wanna pay the $7 to see if this is gonna be there? Because long term, is this is this what I'm gonna be dealing with if I kinda get this kinda, like, bristled first, experience? And what's interesting is, like, you know, I think Vercel does a great, is definitely masking this, but I'm sure they also are throwing just, like, more RAM so that way people don't kind of run into this kinda, early turn offs, of the of the service.

And I think, you know, obviously, Heroku and, Netlify, and I haven't done much stuff with any of the cloud foot Cloudflare, like, workers or pages and stuff like that, but, I'm guessing those are probably a little bit smoother experiences. And so, yeah, it's just like all this friction, and how do you keep momentum with the friction that just presents itself? And that's where my that's where my head's at right now. But, so it's, yeah, it's 436 now. I'm gonna try to knock out, this client thing that I just need to get done because we we need to get this and this is this is not even the the file mapping thing that I was just referring to.

I need to get this other client thing done so that way I can get back to doing that client mapping. So then I can actually figure out what's going on with the deploys to render, and whether I even wanna go that route or not or, or something else. But, I guess I and I guess the only reason why I'm really thinking render is because I like the idea of their managed postgres service potentially. But I don't know. Maybe I just go SQLite, and I do the replicash thing or something or have some other way of being able to manage, you know, SQLite at scale.

But at the same time, I just I listened to, the recent episode of database school with, Aaron Francis and taking listening to them, or him discuss, Postgres with, I guess it's called Xata or xata, the company that's actually gonna be sponsoring his Postgres course that he's working on. I mean and that stuff sounds super cool. You know? Like, the the idea of, you know, using their extensions, pgstream, and I'm blanking on the other one, but it all sounded really great. And it's like, okay.

Well, you know, maybe I reevaluate the provider that I'm thinking about using for database stuff. And I guess also my I guess, the wrestling there is I've definitely you know, I've I've I've either you know, I've done, like, the $5 DigitalOcean, spin up a droplet, have, you know, the data like, whether it's MySQL or Postgres, you know, all just bundled in there. And it works fine until you wanna start kind of, like, breaking up resources and making sure that one service, if it's running a little too hot, doesn't take down the other. And that's kind of where my reservations lie with just going with the $5 potato server approach. I feel like I've been kind of burnt by that a little too much in the past.

And, also, I mean, the two references that I'm thinking about, one was, a service that I was that I have, like, kind of just running in the background called the optimized toolset, which runs lighthouse test in the background on the server. And you could basically, you know, throw it in a bunch of URLs to different projects that you're working on and then monitor the lighthouse scores. And And that was kind of, you know, something that spun out from working on a client project for an agency. I was just seeing wildly inconsistent, results when I was trying to do some tests for a specific client that we were working on. I figured I probably shouldn't be running these tests here locally and then also just, like, dealing with these, like, JSON files and then trying to cross compare different runs from the previous one to the next and and managing all these files locally.

Let's just throw it up on the server. And so that's, you know, that's definitely a resource where because, you know, Lighthouse isn't a non it's not just a database transaction. It's actually, you know, running some stuff that's doing some heavier lifting. And granted, it was on a queue and everything else, but, you know, that was all on the same server. So once those lighthouse tests start running, everything else starts to drop down, and that's just not a great experience.

I think I tried to do a, like, connect like a worker, instance that I would use to then throw off all that queue stuff over there. But I think I was running into some weird connectivity issues either within DigitalOcean or how I was trying to set that up in Forge. Not a 100% sure. So, you know, those are the kind of things that have are in the back of my mind when I'm trying to make these decisions on how I break this stuff up, because I just don't want to be frustrated with that kind of stuff. And I wanna focus on the real things of building.

But you know what that means? That's just the reality. They these kind of, like, frustrations or, these hurdles that you gotta jump over and figure out. This is what makes or breaks, you know, someone from actually breaking out and having something that they can, get out there and sell and is useful. And, also maybe kinda going back to, something that Justin Jackson had, I think, threw out there a couple years ago.

But building stuff when you have small kids is just tricky. I mean, the one thing I've been trying to do is just really work on my reps and just make sure that I am consistently trying to do something in a in a forward moving fashion. But trying to do that with kind of like an inconsistent, lifestyle and, inconsistent, opportunities to do different stuff. Like, you know, every every single day is kinda slightly different. Thankfully, this last last week or so has been kind of consistent ish, but my kids are going on fall break.

We have conferences coming up tomorrow and Friday, and they're on, like, a, kinda like, a, like, a mini fall break. And that's just throwing in some different stuff that I gotta, kinda, deal with. We're gonna do a little trip, which is gonna be fun, but it's just, you know, just another thing that's gonna kind of, like, make it hard to get in those consistent reps. So not sure where the I mean, basically, just trying to keep momentum, trying to keep, like, a positive outlook on this stuff, trying to make the best decision that I can within the the period of time that I'm able to make the decision. And hopefully, those decisions, don't cause too much friction in, in for my future self.

And I guess I'm just gonna try to keep it there. I'm I'm over on this one big time, but, just got a lot of thoughts here at 4:43 AM in the morning on a Wednesday. And gonna try to knock out some client stuff so I can get to some personal stuff and try to build some margin in my life. So with that, have a great one, and I'll talk to you later.