andrew_wc_brown

AWS has over 175+ services and is continually improving. I would say more new services on launch don't live up to the promise but quarter after quarter you see dramatic improvement, some services it's year after year. What makes AWS so valuable is not individual services but the fact you can string them together which outweighs the feature set of a single service.

Github is amazing for developer happiness but CodeCommit is secure and seamlessly integrates with so many AWS Services I Can live without all the bells and whisltes of Github.

AWS Business Support is only $100 / USD per month where you can call in 24/7 and be connected with a Cloud Support Engineer within 5-15 mins. If you don't like the engineer, hang up call again and get someone different. That's incredibly in-expensive, saves me hours or hiring more devs.

You can get this Business Support for free a year if you join StartupSchool and get 3K USD credits with the business support.

If you can't afford it, maybe you are just hobbying around but AWS offers lots of ways to support you until you have a substainable revenue.

As a fellow content creator, I'd say your book appears to be lacking based on the outline.

I would agree the noise is high and the pairing is poor. I've done Startup School twice and will a third time with the same company.

The sticking keys on the new macbook pro is a serious problem. Always get Apple Care. I have had a problem with the last 3 mac purchases.

I've been using Rails since version 0.8.6 and have apps as old as 8 years I'm still maintaining. I've had teams as large as 20 on a single rails codebase.

You do not need anything other than the MVC pattern.

I would love to see the claimants of these needed abstractions post their code so I could refactor and show you how you're wrong.

If you make good use of your base controllers you can reduce controller code to next to nothing.

If you avoid Rails abstractions such as scopes use callbacks sparingly and focus on writing raw SQL instead of using Arel's query builder your models are easy to manage.

I've built 40+ web-apps in the last decade through freelancing and then had my own web-firm with a team of 8 developers all remote. I got tired of building MVPs and so switched to AWS Training and Consultancy since my passion is with educational training.

What kills projects and drives up costs was:

Client doesn't have a clear vision of what will sell. This is evident since they have multiple business models or they keep changing features to tweak the business model. Have one business model and be confident that you won't change anything. If you have to change then you didn't do market validation and you are wasting money on development.

Client's don't understand the scope of what goes into a app and when you ask them to block out the pages they need come back with only 30% and then an estimate is made based on whats presented. They never think about the admin panel, the auxiliary pages, support pipeline, on-boarding flow. If you can find an "Interaction Designer" who can not only wireframe but design end to end flows this will migrate developer waste.

Bringing in a technical advisor, developer, designer mid project always inflates budget because they provide conflicting advice, try to over architect over process, or now we have two sources of truth, the advisor and the client. If you want to bring in more resources you need to understand you'll be expected to adjust the budget and pay more since you made more work for freelancer/firm than previous.

Flipping the coin I have been brought into projects as a technical advisor, and I have found developers totally lieing about their work by logging fake hours or outsourcing when they are not allowed to. I helped the client gain visibility by showing them how to read git commit history, what a sprint should look like. Re-estimate out tickets and gauge an alternative velocity to help the understand if the speed of the developer matches their cost. What a good/bad commit looks like. But I don't tell the developer what to do, create tasks or make in detail architectural decisions.

AWS, Rails and NodeJS are good as your primary stack since bootcamps churn juniors as low as 2.5K CAD on Rails and NodeJS. AWS is good since it gives you full visibility and helps you enforce good practices so you have less technical debt down the road.

I've hired developers out of bootcamps, hired them off of upwork, randomly cold-emailed developers I liked. I get them from everywhere. Its a 1:40 ratio to find a developer with good work ethic.

I care about work ethic and best practices/good habits first and developer experience second.

I would suggest getting lo-fi sketches of every possible page in desktop for your admin, marketing, support, onboard, auxiliary and core pages.

Then you get a developer to code them

Then after the functionality is in place you bring in a UX designer to polish the designs.

If you have the money I would get a Interaction Design on day 1.

Another Canadian in Toronto. Its not hard for US companies to work with remote Canadians but there is a perception that taxes, payroll, insurance is hard when its not. Its frustrating because the US dollar has more buying power so they can get higher quality developers at a lower rate.