moorg's comments

You'd be surprised how many firms have subscriptions to billing insights, know-your-customer, fraud detection and other similar services. Many of the "AI" companies that are emerging do such things.

Presumably.

It's also possible that some organizations incur more than $9 per month in admnistrative or other costs to bill a single customer.

For those who haven't followed the story:

2007 - the Clojure programming language is announced by Rich Hickey and gains quite a bit of traction over the next 5 or 6 years. It never becomes a "top 5" language, but it could still today be arguably considered a mainstream language. It's been endorsed as "the best general purpose programming language out there" by "Uncle" Bob Martin[1] (author of Clean Code) and Gene Kim[2] (auther of The Phoenix Project, the seminal DevOps book). The fact that Rich spent two years working on it without pay and without the commercial backing many other languages enjoy is a real testament to his commitment and his vision. A Clojure-related emacs package[3] quotes Rich when it starts a REPL: "Design is about pulling things apart."

2012 - the Datomic database is announced by Rich Hickey's company. The database is praised for its ingenuity and its "time travel" features. It was designed to be deployed anywhere in the beginning, but, over time, it became difficult to deploy outside of AWS environments and even the AWS deployment path was quite cumbersome--the Datomic marketing page used to feature a maze-like diagram of all the AWS-specific features needed to make the thing work (it would be nice to find a link to that picture); I'd think most companies would have trouble digesting that and integrating it into their technology "stack".

2020 - Nubank (a Brazilian fintech backed by at least one US venture firm and a large production user of Datomic) acquires Rich Hickey's company. It appears Datamic never gained much use outside of a handful of companies. Making it free of charge (2023) may be the cost-effective thing to do in such a situation if it costs more to handle billing and payments than are brought in. The reason they're not releasing the source code could be legal one or simply the fact that open sourcing a large piece of software takes a lot of effort--something a for-profit financial services company like Nubank doesn't prioritize (rightly so).

1: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/08/22/WhyClojure.... 2: https://itrevolution.com/articles/love-letter-to-clojure-par... 3: https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/blob/master/cider-uti...

Five years in, no salary, and not enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses? That sheds a pretty poor light on venturing out on one's own.

The author seems like a pretty bright person, and the About Me page lists an ivy league education and some prior work experience. What prospects, then, would someone from a more humble background have? Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living?

The media paints entrepreneuship as a high calling and "founders" are seen as stars of the show, but is the reality much bleaker?

GitOps is great, of course, but it's possible to go overboard. Most kubernetes deployments in the wild seem to use argocd or fluxcd where every app deployment results in a new commit.

The shortcomings of storing information in git? It's not queryable, for one. Something like etcd would be better for shorter-lived information like app image version. Second, it doesn't work well with larger codebases where there are multiple writers.

Reading the ads, it's remarkable how many computer manufacturers there were. Most of them look like pretty small companies too, effectively showing how low the barrier to entry was to start a computer company. Shouldn't it be possible today, too? Why do we have so few manufacturers?

Because of Title IV[1] subsidies and a decades-long belief that going to college is a sure path to the middle and upper classes, there's an excess capacity of professors. Without such subsidies, most of that driveling would never have been published.

This article seems to focus on American academics. The situation must be better in other places?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IV

Good observation. It reminds of Etsy giving up its status as a B Corp[1], presumably due to pressure from shareholders. Once the ship is set in motion, it can't divert its course even if it wanted to.

1: https://www.etsy.com/news/business-as-a-force-for-good-defin...