This is literaly just a bare repo over ssh, and a gitweb interface.
It's too trivial for anyone to be selling that. And I don't think there's a large market for $5-$10 barebones setup when GH is free and you can self host.
I've used Pikapods to host my Forgejo instance for about a year and have had absolutely no complaints. I use it for small Godot projects and have used the Git plugin in the Godot asset store to connect to it, so I don't even have to leave the editor to make commits or branches.
I pay DigitalOcean $6/mo for a VM that started out as just that - a bare repo and ssh. If it was available at the time, I'd probably have paid $10 for the same if I didn't have to set up and administer the thing. I lost interest in administrating web servers in the early Apache 2.0 days so a private "mini-githib" would be tempting.
(I use that VM as my primary public nameserver now and I don't really need a web front end for git so I'll be keeping my current setup. But if it had been available back then, I'd probably have gone for it.)
A few weeks ago I was co-hosting a live coding session (in front of a crowd, it was pretty collaborative, back-and-forth).
I had to authorize something with Firebase, for which I had to auth with Google, for which I had to do a MFA with my (Pixel) phone.
Usually it's "are you trying to auth" and finger-to-the-scanner, but around that time this particular way didn't work. It also didn't want to send me a text or a call to auth me.
No, I had to find an OTP code. Easy, right? Wrong. The instructions, and the docs, don't match where it was in that particular version of Android, and there were a bunch of blind alleys that were named basically the same.
It took me like 10 minutes, on stage, browsing my phone (thankfully, not casted to screen) to find the friggin' option. Thankfully the cohost was doing the presenting at that time, but it was pretty lousy.
And this is using Google's OS on a Google phone doing a Google auth flow for a Google property. And I'm a techie who's been using Android for 15+ years now. And I did the exact same dance a few weeks before that - also so roundabout I had no idea how I stumbled on the correct page.
User experience my ass.
PS. The regular "are you trying to sign in?" flow works again. No idea what happened - wasn't me.
I run a dev agency, and I can spot one when I see one.
The trouble with dev agencies, "services companies", integration specialists and "forward deployed engineers" is that they scale lineraly with the number of people.
You can't 100x your revenue without at least 80x-ing your headcount.Oh, you might go for that once due to AI - but so can everyone else. After that, it's boring linear growth.
When I say "boring", I don't mean as "capitalism requires exponential growth" critique. I mean OpenAI valuation is not priced for that. They're priced for singularity. If the bulk of their revenue turns out to be bodyshop, that's...quite a different math.
The way to charge big with this kind of work is to do what big consultancies (MBB, IBM, etc) do: brand equity and (supposed) expertise in solving domain problems. OpenAI has ... interesting tech.
It's going to be interesting seeing if they can pull this off. If I were a betting man, my money would be on "no".
Many of these companies do build up internal know-how.
In case of big consulting companies, they have huge internal knowledge bases, decks, cases etc from previous engagements. In case of product companies with FDEs, the feedback from customers ideally trickles down to product improvements. In case of OpenAI, they can improve their models.
Whether that's actually valuable enough to turn a blind eye to the downsides of consulting, I don't know.
> Stop shipping distributed systems when you meant to ship a feature.
But not in the contex the author meant.
Many people don't realize that when you have a frontend, a backend (several instances, for failover/scaling), a (separate) database, maybe some object store -- you have a distributed system.
A recent article[0] touched on that, although most HN commenters[1] latched on the "go" part. But there's something to avoiding rube goldberg machines where we don't need them.
If you want to design TV remotes, you better learn Blender.
If you want to host something complex enough to warrant AWS, you should also understand how to run it yourself.
These arguments for AWS are boring and sound like uninspired regurgitation of their sales pitch. I recall hearing the same about IIS and Windows a few decades back.
Turns out, they both have pretty good marketing departments!
It's too trivial for anyone to be selling that. And I don't think there's a large market for $5-$10 barebones setup when GH is free and you can self host.
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