tw: I’m gonna go on a rant here, it’s a bit confused and comes from a place of discontent with the absolutely disgusting mishandling of wealth and energy by some organizations and (in this case) individual developers. Through it I will make assertions that are likely incorrect. I will also be up wayyyy on my high horse, a horse I am still barely learning to ride.
[If you feel called out by this post, good. Make a comment and lets chat about it.]
I was just reading a post on someone’s blog they linked from their bluesky talking about how they managed to save a boatload of money because they were spinning up VMs and VPCs and VPSs all willy nilly and finally got a handle on their spending.
Do y’all not realize you can run your apps on a machine that you own? LET IT BE SLOW, YOU’RE LITERALLY IN DEVELOPMENT, IT DOESN’T NEED TO BE FAST. And if you slow down a whole federated network in the process, well, consider that a consequence of federation.
I’m glad I learned to do this shit on my own. Sure it’d be nice to have a VPS for load balancing or as a backup host for downtime, but like, consider the monthly costs of those fees and weigh them against purchasing your own gear. The X-Intercept on those graphs is closer to now than you think it is. Rentership has always been a scam. Don’t forget their goal is to make it so easy you never leave the service and spend (what did they say?) over $700 a month for some indev projects completely indefinitely.
I pay for the electricity to run my server, and my internet bill. That’s it.
The only time it’s ever gonna actually be cheaper to use someone else’s gear is when the cooling needs become untenable, and if you’re working responsibly and remembering the fact that our planet is burning and will be uninhabitable by humans in the next hundred years without some major fucking changes then you’re definitely being responsible with your CPU cycles (and therefore heat generation) and not just hashing or rolling dice with markov chains… right?
Some of y’all need to put down the AI tools and pick up a fucking Arduino. There is a more efficient way.
</rant>
Nora
Quick Ninja Edit before someone crawls up my butt about my last comment:
Embedded development can teach you SO much about what actually matters, and how to actually obey the KISS principle. Working with arduino, developing network stacks to make them communicate with each other, figuring out for your self how this whole “internet” thing actually functions will make you a better, more efficient developer. Limit yourself. Limitation is the mother of invention.
For math’s sake, please limit yourself.