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[12:57:31] <GothAlice> Amazon Linux AMIs? https://gist.github.com/amcgregor/4947201 + https://gist.github.com/amcgregor/1522110 for fun and profit. Or, at least, a private cloud infrastructure five or so years ago. Capable of running without permanent storage. By RAIDing together the ephemeral dom0 local storage offered to each VM.

[12:59:26] <GothAlice> (Also how I run PostgreSQL servers; using WAL-e to stream the replication log, per minute, onto S3. ;)

[13:01:27] <synthmeat> i swear we'd go under 3 times over if we used AWS

[13:02:10] <GothAlice> synthmeat: Self-hosting is always cheaper. For me, with my dataset, a one-time fee of $17,000 was far better than the required half a million per month it'd take to host on Amazon.

[13:02:45] <GothAlice> synthmeat: And don't get me started on DO. They used to have a UserVoice feature request site, may still. Haven't checked it in years, since they haven't checked it in years. Average open issue time of three to five. Years.

[13:03:51] <synthmeat> yeah, i'm still waiting on http2 on their "CDN"

[13:04:46] <GothAlice> For me it was waiting for Gentoo support, or the ability to utilize custom VM base images. I eventually worked around their reliance on Ubuntu by installing Gentoo from within Ubuntu. Like some sort of parasite eating the host from within, to become the host.

[13:05:13] <GothAlice> Absolutely not worth the effort.

[13:05:35] <synthmeat> i'd still advise anyone starting their business not to even consider aws. good default.

[13:06:17] <synthmeat> and yet, it does seem to be default for most people

[13:54:30] <GothAlice> “Good default positions” tend to be unthinking knee-jerk reactions allowing those without systems engineering knowledge/skills to avoid common pitfalls. If you’re a systems engineer or software architect, there are no defaults. There are only needs, evaluated, and potential solutions, evaluated.

[13:55:11] <GothAlice> If you can get away with pages.github.com for a site, do it, by Romulus. But sometimes people do actually have more complex needs.

[13:56:00] <GothAlice> For example, developing the Facebook game for the TV series The Bachelor. Infrastructure cost was hardly a concern to them.

[13:56:27] <GothAlice> (8GB capped collection to track the complete history of events for one million simultaneous in-fight games. ;)

[13:56:32] <GothAlice> (Per day.)

[14:09:07] <synthmeat> GothAlice: ha, you also did fb games?

[14:09:19] <GothAlice> Gave presentations on building them, even, aye.

[14:09:46] <synthmeat> 2008: "Oh, you do fb games? That's awesome! Let's have sex!", 2011: "Oh, you fucking scum." :D

[14:11:34] <GothAlice> https://www.slideshare.net/montrealpython/mp24-the-bachelor-a-facebook-game / https://gist.github.com/amcgregor/4207375 for the 1.9 million DRPC calls per second MongoDB-as-queue solution I built for that game.

[14:12:00] <GothAlice> Less about the game itself or the content of the show, but the technical merits of the software developed.

[14:12:14] <GothAlice> Could care less about the specific game mechanics we implemented. ;)

[14:12:25] <GothAlice> (Dating game sim. Yay.)

[14:12:40] <synthmeat> there's some evil technical delight in those mechanics too

[14:13:04] <GothAlice> Well, gotta make it… encouraging… to engage? :coughadditictivecough:

[14:14:15] <GothAlice> Don’t worry, I’m holding off developing the most viral possible FB app I have ever heard of. It’s… genius, absolutely exploiting the psychology of offence and revenge / vengeance. But… would not make the world a happier place, at all. So I resist. ;)

[14:15:17] <GothAlice> (“Your friend Alice has put you in a box labelled ‘shady characters’! Sign up now to remove yourself, or add your own friends to boxes!” ← nobody wants to be in a box, so there’s a deep psychological drive towards sign-up, here. Vengeance in that by signing up you can put your friend in their OWN box. ;)

[14:16:04] <GothAlice> And that’s pretty much it. It’s absolutely daft. But… would be silly effective.

[14:16:41] <synthmeat> i did mostly frontend back then though. was fun, (probably one of the) first 3d game on the platform, first AR game on there, and such

[14:16:56] <synthmeat> flash was nice

[14:18:07] <synthmeat> RoR guys from the shop couldn't really catch up with perf requirements in the end

[14:20:41] <GothAlice> Every RoR app I’ve encountered fails attempting to handle my middle name.

[14:21:51] <GothAlice> Actually, fails at my name.

[14:23:04] <GothAlice> “Alice Zoë Bevan–McGregor” ← Savvy developers in the audience will recognize this immediately as UTF-8 accepted as binary, interpreted as ISO-8859-1. ë (e with umlaut) → ë and — (em dash) → – are distinctive.

[14:23:35] <GothAlice> (That’s how my name showed on my iTunes albums for a month or so after initial publication. ;)

[14:26:42] <synthmeat> well, it sure helps warding off album piracy :D

[15:09:44] <GothAlice> synthmeat: I seed my own album Torrents, and provided the music on SoundCloud (at the time) and now clyp.it. Pay me if you’re going to pay me, but enjoy my music regardless. With the special note that if you use iTunes Match or Apple Music, you “steal” my music, I still get paid. ;)

[15:10:53] <GothAlice> In Canada it’s case-law that digital duplication is not theft as no-one is deprived of the original material, thus there is no harm. :)

[15:11:26] <GothAlice> At least, in the “stolen” sense. I argue against the possible interpretation of a “copy” as a “lost sale” because they weren’t going to pay for it anyway. ;^)