I've worked a lot on this sort of thing in my company, as we spawn new projects every few weeks. We went from 4 days to deploy a fully-functioning Django+React+CI on AWS to literally 30min (much of it just waiting) using similar approaches.

And now we have the same thing for API Platform, NestJS, Vue, NextJS... Even React-Native with Fastlane and CodePush :) It's been invaluable, and a very strong commercial argument

What kind of company that spawns new projects every few weeks are you working for ? This sounds cool =)

The situation isn't clear to me. What changed that lead to more productive deployments?

Using templates, boilerplates and generators.

Creating a new project is simply "make generate" from our generator, then answering a bunch of questions about what tech stack you need. This works mostly with templating (using Plop) and a sprinkle of automation for shell tasks (eg `pipenv install`)

Thanks for clarifying. What used to take 4 days to set up a new server can now be done in <1hr. How often is that being taken advantage of? "Any time we need a new server" is determined by a policy determining whether to bolt onto additional servers or not. Curious about that policy..

Is your generator hand rolled or do you use something in particular? We’re working towards a similar solution where we want to layer/compose different tech choices based on what’s mandated by project requirements!

> To many people's surprise, I can crank out a fully-functional side project in two to five days by having already completely automated devops.

This is something that did not occur to me until I have done a lot of consulting for small and medium size companies. All of them have the same basic challenges - they don't have tooling to do basic crap for example, they can blast some notification to everyone that is registered in their service but sending an email from a email-message-to-specific-set-of-people requires a workflow deploy. Same goes for provisioning a new domain and wiring it up to nodejs backend, etc, etc, etc.

Automate basic devops first, from DNS management to email sending to deploys to workflows, etc. Think of every project you are going to to later being a "client" of your devops "infrastructure".

I love the pricing for imgz.org! :-)

Thanks, I love how the high price just overflows out of the box :P

I saw your no BS games Show HN recently, good work. That imgz website and copy, what an incredible piece of art! You're totally right about what imgur has become, first starting out as a reddit image host, then taking VC money, and inevitably becoming "web scale".

Thank you! I can promise you imgz will never become "web scale" because nobody's using it and that's the way it should be.