This looks good, and I’m a target user in this space.

One thing I’ve noticed is the prevalence of Docker for this type of tool, or the larger self-managed PaaS tools. I totally get it, and it makes sense. I’m just slow to adapt. I’ve been so used to Go binary deployments for so long. But I also don’t really like tweaking Caddyfiles and futzing with systemd unit files, even though the pattern is familiar to me now. Been waffling on this for quite a while…

I'm a waffler on this as well, increasingly leaning away from containers lately. I can recall one time in my pre-Docker career when I was affected by a bug related to the fact that software developed on Mac OS ran differently than software running on CentOS in production. But I have spent untold countless hours trying to figure out various Docker-related quirks.

If you legitimately need to run your software on multiple OSes in production, by all means, containerize it. But in 15 years I have never had a need to do that. I have a rock solid bash script that deploys and daemonizes an executable on a linux box, takes like 2 seconds to run, and saves me hours and hours of Dockery.

I don't understand how running a single command to start either a single container or a stack of them with compose, that then gets all the requirements in a tarball similar and just runs is seen as more complicated than running random binaries, setting values on php.ini, setting up mysql or postgres, demonizing said binaries and making sure libraries and the like are in order.

You're going to be setting all that stuff up either way, though. It'll either be in a Dockerfile, or in a Vagrantfile (or an Ansible playbook, or a shell script, ...). But past a certain point you can't really get away from all that.

So I think it comes down to personal preference. This is going to sound a bit silly, but to me, running things in VMs feels like living in an apartment. Containers feel more like living out of a hotel room.

I know how to maintain an apartment, more or less. I've been living in them my whole life. I know what kinds of things I generally should and should not mess with. I'm not averse to hotels by any means, but if I'm going to spend a lot of time in a place, I will pick the apartment, where I can put all of my cumulative apartment-dwelling hours to good use.

Yes, thank you for answering on my behalf. To underscore this, the decision is whether to set up all of your dependencies and configurations with a tool like bash, or to set it all up within Docker, which involves setting up Docker itself, which sometimes involves setting up (and paying for) things like registries and orchestration tools.

I might tweak the apartment metaphor because I think it's generous to imply that, like a hotel, Docker does everything for you. Maybe Dockerless development is like living in an apartment and working on a boat, while using Docker is like living and working on a houseboat.

There is one thing I definitely prefer Docker for, and that's running images that were created by someone else, when little to no configuration is required. For example, running Postgres locally can be nicer with Docker than without, especially if you need multiple Postgres versions. I use this workflow for proofs of concepts, trials, and the like.

I suppose like anything, it's a preference based on where the majority of your experience is, and what you're using it for. If you're running things you've written and it's all done the same way, docker probably is just an extra step.

I personally run a bunch of software I've written, as well as open source things. So for me docker makes everything significantly easier, and saves me installing a lot of rubbish I don't understand well.

After 20 years of various things breaking on my (admittedly franken) debian installs after each dist-upgrade, and spending days troubleshooting each time, I recently took the plunge and switched all services to docker-compose.

I then booted into a new fresh clean debian environment, mounted my disks, and:

  cd /opt/docker/configs; for i in *; do cd $i; docker-compose up -d; cd ..; done

voila, everything was up and working, and no longer tied to my underlying OS. Now at least I can keep my distro and kernel etc all up to date without worrying about anything else breaking.

Sure, I have a new set of problems, but they feel smaller.

> Now at least I can keep my distro and kernel etc all up to date without worrying about anything else breaking.

I get what you are saying, but note a word of caution - kernel upgrades can break container runtimes: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/10623.

Thou hast discovered docker's truest use case.

Like, legit, this is the whole point of docker. Application/service dependencies are no longer tied to the server it is running on, mitigating the worst parts of dependency hell.

Although, in your case, I suppose your tolerance for dependency hell has been quite high ;)

> Application/service dependencies are no longer tied to the server it is running on, mitigating the worst parts of dependency hell.

Until you decide to optimise for resources, and do crazy things like “one postgres instance, one influxdb instance” instead of “one instance per microservice”, and then you get back into hell pretty quick.

Winds me up how massive tiny applications become, and how my choices are to throw money (RAM) at the problem, or money (time) at the problem. I wonder when someone will do the math and prove that developer laziness is having a substantial drag on global efficiency. The aggregate cost bourn by users has to be orders of magnitude larger than the cost savings made by developers at this point.

I'm doing exactly the same thing. I started to do everything on Synology with Doctor Compose and got rid of most Synology apps: through open source applications.

At some point I moved individual containers to other machines and they work perfectly. VPS, NUC no matter what.

Yea, in same boat and I'm wondering if there is big contingent of devs out there that bristle at Docker. Biggest issue I run into writing my lab software is finding decent enough container registry but now I just endorse free tier of Vultr CR.

I just use the github registry, but I've been paying for their personal pro subscription for years now so it wasn't really an "additional" cost for me.

I did the same, created a thing that is supposed to be a collection of scripts to set up a vps without any container. You can check it out at https://github.com/diogocasado/coderaft

Here's the thing, we've code running on VPS in cloud for a decade with any problem

When we ran it on kubernets, without touching it, it broke itself in 3 years.

Docker is fantastic developement tool, I do see real value in it.

But kubernets and whole ecosystem? You must apply updates or your stuff will break one day.

Currently I am using docker with docker compose and GCR, it does make things very simply and easy to develop and it's also self documenting.

Kubernetes doesn't break on itself. This is totally untrue. The only thing that is a timebomb are the ssl certificates it is using but they can easily be checked and renewed.

I'm pro kubernetes, but AWS does push you to upgrade your cluster fairly often (annually?) which could break things. It would be cool if kubernetes had LTS releases.

We were using gcp and aws managed kubernets.

Same experience in both places.

The app broke itself.

Now we don't use managed kubernets anymore.

There are tools like firecracker that significantly reduces docker overhead https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

I believe fly.io uses that. Not sure if OP’s tool does that

No Sidekick doesn't use firecracker. I know fly.io is built around it yes. They do that so they can put your app to sleep - basically shutting it down - then spin it up real quick when it gets a request. No place for this in Sidekick vision

Was wondering the same— didn’t see any mention of it in the GH page though, nor even in roadmap

I’m not sure what you’re comparing that to. This project is about easily deploying your own app/side-project, which wouldn’t be available via apt.

Not sure how true this statement is in general, but it’s definitely not true of course for what the project described as the use case, eg your own side project/app, which you’d obviously not be able to “apt install.” Unless OP meant like the supporting hosting/proxy infra like Apache/nginx, which yeah, that’s what this project is trying to avoid/abstract for the user to have to deal with.

At the end of the day if you use this tool I guess all you’d need to worry about (given the tool is stable and works obviously) would be apt upgrades of the OS and even that you can automate, and then just figure out your reboot strategy. For me, I don’t even want to deal with that, so I happily use fly.

Respect! Fly is an absolute beast and to me is best in class for sure!

While it may be comforting to think you're just sticking it to "Amazon", if you look at almost anything you're doing, you're going to see other people who are really at the other end of this apathy. Whether it's co-workers you're blocking or giving half-effort to, customers being ignored, or the new engineer that is neglected.

Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.

Man, all of that sounds awful for those coworkers and customers. But it isn't GPs problem. It isn't their company. He doesn't employ them. He isn't responsible for their experience. Put the blame on their poor experience squarely where it belongs: management. Why is shitty management letting some underperformer ruin things? Super convenient to claim personal integrity and shift the blame to the underperformer when management is clearly not demonstrating personal integrity and protecting their team and customers.

That's a good point: demotivating people and making them leave, having all those side effects on bystanders... it's all coming from the management decision.

And this is Amazon, they are normally so careful about mental suffering of coworkers... ...

It is the GP’s problem when this coworkers don’t want to work with them again.

The tech hubs (SF, Seattle, NYC are pretty small communities.

Any place that has hundreds of thousands of tech workers isn't small.

In a town of 50k people you'll die not knowing probably 80% of them.

They are small in a sense and vast in a sense. You may know some people personally but never interact with them at work even though in theory your systems are adjacent.

I think the prior commenter’s point might be more clearly stated as “why hold rank and file employees responsible for overall conditions within the company, rather than those actually responsible for overall conditions within the company [management].”

A person doesn’t physically exist. It’s just a bunch of cells interacting with each other. Likewise a cell doesn’t really exist, it’s just a bunch of proteins and lipids, but likewise those are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles!

Anyhow, corporations exist just as much as any other collective entity and have their own behavioral norms.

The constituents of the person physically exist, the different scales are just labels to group the particles/atoms/molecules/...

Corporations on the other hand exist purely in the mind, it's not about scale. It's just a tool, a mental framework. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juridical_person

> A juridical person is a legal person that is not a natural person but an organization recognized by law as a *fictitious* person such as a corporation, government agency, non-governmental organisation, or international organization (such as the European Union).

Also limited liability companies did not really exist until the 19th century. It's just useful abstractions above people interacting with each other. I get it's easier to live not being conscious of the bare metal, too bad people lose their humanity in the process.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

What if the system is evil by design? You are already at the "systemic evil" step, from the start.

Since the 30% is so often mentioned, it’s worth noting that both Apple and Google have dropped it to 15% for developers under $1M in revenue.

I’ve gotten to see some of that at a local level and… I just don’t know. We barely managed to pass a local school levy to recoup from a major accounting error that would have meant massive layoffs for the district. It’s a pretty good district academically, and I was shocked at how many empty nesters (new ones, too) were vocal about voting no just because “no new taxes“, despite all of their kids consuming that very system with great benefit for the past 18 years.

A few counties away, the library district said without a tax increase, they’ll have to shut down. “No new taxes” carried the day. Library shut down. Now folks are howling. And again it’s the non-voting kids that suffer.

If this is the behavior of folks about issues affecting their neighbors, in their own town, I’m not too optimistic what sort of support we could see for any kind of longer-term issue, especially if it isn’t atop the media cycle.

The way I (not the previous poster) envision this working is not that you can opt out of taxes, but you can skip certain items.

So I don't pay Israel's defense budget, but that money is reallocated evenly to everything else.

I find it hard to believe a meaningful number of people would opt out of libraries and schools assuming their overall tax burden is unchanged.

This sounds like a good way to accidentally create an industry of reverse lobbyists where the government contracts them to convince tax payers to allocate money to their department.

I might be too pessimistic though, I tend towards liking the idea but I'm concerned about the changes it could cause.

That already happens. Why else would Northrop advertise a stealth jet at the superbowl.

if they vote against a tax levy for a school they will most definitely vote to send the money elsewhere.

Empty nesters or childless people will funnel their tax money to things like parks, fire trucks, and other things.

Hypothecated taxes are an anti-pattern, for precisely this reason. Setting the budget and setting the taxes should be somewhat separated (but not too separated!)

It’s a technique and may or may not be effective for a particular team. When I was an EM, we’d fairly regularly take stock of any processes to assess whether they were worth keeping, needed tweaks, etc. Funnily enough, on the daily standup one, I was the one who didn’t think it would remain, but the team really liked it.

I remember us once giving a supplier access to our internal bug tracker for a collaborative project. They were unable to get to the “…/openissue” endpoint.

Including the ones you visited on your phone, and even maybe as an in-app web view? Add to that the HN reader app I use and I’m finding a lot more escapes browser history.

You can do Add To Home, but you’ll get errors if you try to launch without any network. Though the PWA model can provide for a fully offline experience, I’ve found that only a minority offer good offline + sync. It is sort of the opposite of native apps, which usually have offline/local, and might have sync.