Glench

There’s also the article “Consider SQLite”: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

The above article was what convinced me to use SQLite in my new business. 5 years later, serving 120+ million requests per month and still working great. To be fair, most of those requests are served out of redis, but I’m still running off of cheap digital ocean droplets.

Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241212091703/https://www.nytim...

I needed something like this once but I forget why. Now I would probably just use val.town to build it instead of spinning up my own go server.

I mean yeah, but we never start from nothing of course! Totally agree. But our experience should always be the ground truth we test against and if the science disagrees then we should hold the science lightly or ignore it. But if the science offers us something that works in our direct experience then great! And there is a progressive feedback loop as we continue to notice more about our experience and also learn more from research. That's been my experience anyway :)

> I want to believe stuff like this, but the whole field is so mired in quackery and jingo it's hard to believe any of it.

Haha yes I just saw a youtube video last night of a personal account that said something that seemed to directly contradict what the author of this post learned ("static stretches don't work" whereas this author is saying they worked for him).

I feel like for these kinds of cases where there is contradictory information that it is better to rely on direct experience in my own body rather than just scientific information about what's supposed to work. Use mindful awareness to feel directly what's happening in the muscles and tissues and how it changes over time using the different types of techniques. Then I don't really need to believe anything anyone says. The downside of this approach is that we may miss out on important information if we're ONLY relying on direct experience. But direct experience should be the foundation in my opinion.

Reading your question, I think Svelte or SvelteKit is probably a good option like you said. It's basically just JS/HTML/CSS as normal but if you want interactive UI stuff it's very simple to add. At this point SvelteKit is totally stable, it's just not as popular as React so it doesn't have as much community / LLM support.

I don't know if the intention of the article was to stoke worry but actually embrace as opportunity! Users being able to make their own software for their own needs is a worthy and beautiful goal. It's like if people could only eat what was at restaurants and not cook for themselves.

And of course with iteration and feedback loops people can definitely learn how to specify what they want in a fairly precise way.

Really heartening to see commenters in this thread concerned about plastic pollution! I have also tried to stopped buying clothes with plastic (polyester). Probably not our biggest environmental concern at the moment, but still might as well develop good habits of consuming in a way that minimizes my impact on the environment.

Glad to see other comments bringing this to light. As Saul Griffith likes to point out, physics indicates that stuffing CO2 back into the ground is not an easy or cost-effective job. Stopping it from entering the atmosphere is much simpler. Also Saul mentioned that the IPCC models have a disproportionate amount of faith in CO2 removal technologies which at this point is an unproven and uneconomical option and for physics-related reasons will probably remain so.

Also, there doesn't seem to be an appreciation of the speed at which we need to stop emissions to meet 1.5C or even 2C of warming. It's at the point where if we don't replace almost every car, furnace, stove, etc with its electric counterpart and power them with clean electricity (due to the continuous emissions of those machines for their lifetime, assuming no early retirement), we can guarantee breaching the 1.5C limit. We need a World War 2 level buy-in from government, industry, and consumers. I wish this was more widely known.

I don't! I take the moment of downtime. It's usually instant — only as long as it takes to stop and restart the server. Occasionally a DB migration will take longer — the longest I've so far was 10-15 seconds — and the site is down for that time. I think this is acceptable, but it would be nice to have a more seamless automated solution.

I've been using SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com for about 3 years now! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!

I was convinced that SQLite could be a viable db option from this great post about it called Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.

There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet (or doing some obvious SQLite config optimizations). DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.

One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.

Since the page didn't seem to link to it, here's a really great article about using SQLite in production for moderately-sized web apps: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

That article, along with the ability to have streaming backups with Litestream and not wanting to pay for a separate DB server, inspired me to use SQLite in my SaaS four years ago. I've been enjoying the operational simplicity a lot although there is not a lot of community documentation currently about tuning SQLite for web app loads. My app does about 120m hits a month (mostly cached and not hitting the DB) on a $14/month single-processor DigitalOcean droplet.

I use Litestream for my production web app and stream to Backblaze B2. It's S3 compatible and literally free!

Came here to recommend doing good deeds for others. I find when I'm doing things for the benefit others I feel a lot better (as long as I'm resourced enough to do it). A therapist used to tell me that gratitude and doing good things for others were the most effective evidence-based behavioral interventions for depression.

That said, depression, fear, and lack of confidence are multi-faceted things with many different mitigating and exacerbating causes. Even diet and digestive ability can play a role! I find light exercise to mitigate the effects, too. But a sense of warm-heartedness toward yourself and others will be helpful no matter what.

> What I don't like about stock is that you end up throwing out food.

I have the perfect solution for this. Keep a container in the freezer. Whenever you have an extra unusable vegetable bit from chopping, chuck it in the container. Once the container is full, simmer a big pot with all the bits for 30-45 minutes then strain all the solids.

Good veggie bits to use: onion skins and butts, garlic bits, broccoli stems, carrot greens or butts, celery leaves or those hard bottoms, kale stems, chard stems (although they can really color the stock), asparagus stems, fennel bits, the green leek leaves,

Bad veggie bits, don't use (adds weird/too much flavor): any nightshade bits (bell peppers, tomatoes, eggplant etc), green bean or peadpod tops, squashes, cucumber, zucchini.

Haven't tried other veggies.

About a month ago I made a chrome extension that adds a "sometime this week" todo list at the bottom of google calendar (a feature I copied from Hey calendar). Any items that don't get done roll over to the next week and I can go back to previous weeks to see what I got done. Super helpful to help plan out my week that way and integrated directly into my calendar.

This is one of the best resources I know for how to come up with good business ideas (which is probably one of the hardest parts if you've never done it before): https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

I started the career transition away from tech to therapy: http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/

I have been really impressed with SvelteKit in my production SaaS for about a year now! You can make any type of static/dynamic/combination site, the dev experience is really good, and it feels like it elegantly bridges the front-and-backend (getting data from the back-end, form submission) which is something I've wanted since I started in 2011.

My SaaS uses SvelteKit, SQLite and Sequelize, but I would probably try Drizzle if I was starting today.

> what are the heuristics I can use to understand that this is the right time for me to start a business that does not create huge opportunity costs and is not an impulse that is the result of my impatience?

I'm wondering if it makes sense to think about your goals here. Why are you even thinking about starting a business? Are you trying to make money? To really serve people? Because it's a fun challenge? Because you want financial freedom? Because you see an opportunity? Because you've been told you should or want the status of someone who has "made it"? What's in your heart?

I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each. The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solve a common problem on major websites).

I'm extremely biased (see below) so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think browser extensions are a pretty neat way to break into indie hacking. They cost nothing to run because they're hosted by extension stores. They're often faster and easier to build than whole apps because you can just use them to fix or modify existing websites rather than create your own from scratch. They can get organic traffic from extension stores, especially if they're well-named.

The main piece that was a pain in the ass for me was adding payments, so I made a service to do it (https://extensionpay.com), and now I can just focus on making the extensions work well. Because of all my previous work I was able to build and submit my last extension (making over $500/month now) to the chrome store in four hours — no joke! It was a really cool moment. Plus, running an extension monetization API I'm able to see all the extension that make real money and learn from what works for them.

Here's another great resource about SQLite performance, Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

Yeah I hear you. I recently started logging slow queries to a text file. It was really easy to do but yeah I didn’t really look into more complex monitoring. I wonder if there’s anything out there!

Is there something you want to know specifically? It’s pretty standard basically. I used sequelize (might have chosen something different if starting today) and I build for node running on a single machine. I use pm2 to deploy with nginx in front.

copying and pasting from a different thread because this keeps coming up and I want to share my experience in case it's helpful:

I use SQLite/Litestream for https://extensionpay.com! Serves about 120m requests per month (most of those are cached and don't hit the db), but it's been great!

I was convinced that SQLite could be a viable db option from this great post about it called Consider SQLite: https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/consider-sqlite

Using SQLite with Litestream helped me to launch the site quickly without having to pay for or configure/manage a db server, especially when I didn't know if the site would make any money and didn't have any personal experience with running production databases. Litestream streams to blackblaze b2 for literally $0 per month which is great. I already had a backblaze account for personal backups and it was easy to just add b2 storage. I've never had to restore from backup so far.

There's a pleasing operational simplicity in this setup — one $14 DigitalOcean droplet serves my entire app (single-threaded still!) and it's been easy to scale vertically by just upgrading the server to the next tier when I started pushing the limits of a droplet (or doing some obvious SQLite config optimizations). DigitalOcean's "premium" intel and amd droplets use NVMe drives which seem to be especially good with SQLite.

One downside of using SQLite is that there's just not as much community knowledge about using and tuning it for web applications. For example, I'm using it with SvelteKit and there's not much written online about deploying multi-threaded SvelteKit apps with SQLite. Also, not many example configs to learn from. By far the biggest performance improvement I found was turning on memory mapping for SQLite.

Happy to answer any questions you might have!

> Is this a "good, old fashioned" single durable server type of deployment?

Yep!

> I like my systems made such that the server can die, get scaled vertically and oops data disk wiped, forget to mount volume in a container, etc. without me lifting a finger. It looks like I can do that with litestream, but I always want to hear from people who have tried it in the real world.

I can't really help you there unfortunately, but I know fly.io is trying to offer something like that.

Nope!