Rodolpho Arruda

August 2024

Web Development Zeitgeist 2024

Infra

One single server
VPS (Vercel, Digital Ocean, Hetzner)
Cloudflare DNS
Wasabi (backups)
Google and Hotmail OAuth (B2C)
Own Auth (B2B with their own domain names)
~~Telegram~~ (until Pavel Durov is freed again)
ZeptoMail
NFE.io (electronic invoicing in Brazil)

If you're not doing over a million dollars in ARR for your SaaS app, you almost certainly don't need more than a single server. Chasing a 99.99% uptime in those early days by prematurely optimizing your resilience is a vast of effort that could have fueled features and bug fixes.
— DHH (@dhh) August 24, 2024

Web programmers seem to have no idea just how fast computers have become. The vast majority of all SaaS apps ever made could easily run on a single, beefy beast. Main reason to add multiple machines is for redundancy, and even that is something you can put off for ages. https://t.co/juFinbB3Jq
— DHH (@dhh) August 24, 2024

The web development industrial complex has lied to your face:

– auth: yes you can do it yourself
– scale: yes you can do it yourself
– database: yes you can do it yourself
– server: yes you can do it yourself

And no when your site goes viral you don't need to pay a $20,000 bill https://t.co/JUbX7n5oN7
— @levelsio (@levelsio) August 24, 2024

Stack

This is more of my own stack zeitgeist influenced by other people’s opinions.

nginx
PHP
Bootstrap 5
HTMX
SQLite

My favorite thing about the PHP stack is it lends itself to simplicity. You run Nginx + PHP-FPM, and point it to some files. Website updates = replace the files. No application restarts, no container issues, no complex deployment strategies, no crazy stateful application logic
— Daniel Lockyer (@DanielLockyer) August 24, 2024

I'm convinced you could cover 80%-90% of your use cases with sqlite and be perfectly fine.

Extremely fast.
Extremely easy to use.
Extremely cheap to manage.
Scales like crazy.

Don't look elsewhere until it hurts.
— Santiago (@svpino) August 23, 2024

AI Assistance

VSCode with Cursor.ai and Anthropic Claude Sonnet

Hardware

Laptop
Big screen
Keyboard
Pointing device

Simple is best. I like to keep my setup as simple as possible. pic.twitter.com/0vqbhpiDV7
— typecraft (@typecraft_dev) August 19, 2024

I've never owned a super nice computer. Think I've spent only $1-2K building any PC (ignoring monitors) for the past 25 years but they've always felt good enough for 5-10 years.

What are people doing with their $5K rigs? Dual streaming AAA games at 4K? Heavy video editing?
— Andy Young (@anerdguynow) August 17, 2024

tags

2024, reference, web development