Week 6

Resume work on Composer UI

After a long break from working on Composer UI, I finally resumed it. This idea has lingered in my head for a long and I feel bad for myself for not working to get it out. Even more, I see myself regretting if I miss this opportunity to make something I believe can be impactful.

I won’t entirely blame myself though, given the last 6 months for me have been stressful and point-focused on relocating and settling down in Berlin. A part of it has also been focusing on some critical aspects of PHPSandbox. Although I expect the whole settling down thing to start getting better once we move into our permanent apartment later this month, I think I can give some incremental effort in progressing its development along the way.

As much as I want to take things easy, I also don’t want to wait till I’m all settled before I can start doing some things.

I have a giant list of things I would like to build/do that I kept and every time I look at it, it seems I will never be able to catch up on them. But I want to at least try some of them of which Composer UI is an example.

I did a time-boxed work on the package list part of it this week and can now show outdated packages using a similar Composer colour marking.

I’m still caught between trying to release a quick testable version that just manages global composer packages or just working towards eventually releasing a working MVP. Either way, I think it’s important to do some build-in-public regarding this.

Given my past inconsistencies with building in public, I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off, but I’ll try.

Had a Composer course idea

While working on Composer UI, I had an idea to do a video course on Composer or a handbook. Another idea is yet in the bag. I wonder why no one has done this yet. Do people even need a course on something like Composer?

Working on Composer UI has been revealing in the aspect of what Composer can do and what some parts of it actually are or how they work. Bundling all that knowledge could be useful for a beginner or as a reference for someone who’s already familiar with Composer too.

I’ll see if I can come up with some plan for this and possibly commit to it after moving to the new apartment. For now, the focus will just be

Migrating from AWS

After all my experiments with Cloud run last week, I can finally conclude its pricing doesn’t seem obvious for now because of the little time. It would need more time with actual traffic to know what the actual costs might be.

During the week, I came across Contabo - a cloud hosting company that offers cheaper servers compared to AWS and GCP. This was after a Twitter thread conversation with Ives, the creator of CodeSandbox. I’ve always imagined how they double down on their costs given the size of the platform. It turns out they are running their workload using a cheaper and more reliable alternative.

When I saw this, it changes my imagination of what is possible in terms of cost. I could quickly estimate that on Contabo, we can run our current PHPSandbox infrastructure for 1/10th of what we are paying at AWS for the same specs of servers. In a way I wished I had known this earlier, on the other hand, I’m happy I do now. It’s not too late. One of the things that have worried me about running PHPSandbox is the running cost and it seems this can take my worries away.

I’m cool paying Contabo fees every month as it’s within what my budget allows. Unlike AWS where I seem to get under the pressure that we PHPSandbox should be under an incubator or accelerator or VC to get access to AWS credits or GCP credits to survive the rising costs of having more powerful servers.

I seem to wonder why their pricing is much lower though as they are a small company. Whatever the reason is, I’m happy it existed and that I was able to discover Contabo exists. Maybe there are others like that in other aspects of tech?

Applied for Eng. Mentorship again

Another cycle of mentorship is opening at work and I’m applying to be a mentee to learn Rust. I’m thinking this could help my commitment to learning the language. I know the main work has to be done by me and so, this is more for the sake of accountability - I’m going to need to commit 8 weeks to achieve some goals and this is the best part of the mentorship program.

My last one was for Kubernetes after which the confidence I had after the program was quite useful to start doing stuff on my own.