I’m glad you mention Biff. Thank you. It’s an important part of the solo landscape. I first heard of @U7YNGKDHA’s work last week. My first interaction with him is https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C013Y4VG20J/p1694106052192399 on #biff. I was glad to see he joined the channel yesterday. Welcome, Jacob. Your work is important. I will never know as much as you do about building systems like Biff. Thank you. You will see this channel complements Jacob’s work. It is not in competition. There are many situations and objectives where Biff is exactly the right tool. It may yet be for me. While I could parse those conversations and my thoughts at great length, I think what was missing is the purpose of my project. To that end, I posted https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C05P6UP4G2K/p1694713929928749 to #life. In short, I need Life (my project) to come online and stay online, to scale and grow in its place. That’s why full stack has Datomic at the backend and I’m looking for a plug-and-play chat client for the time being. Will real revenue change things? I’ll report back when I have some. If my thinking turns out to be flawed, I’ll be back here, close down the channel, and build Life in Biff with Jacob looking over my shoulder.

Welcome @U03RJ0AMUS1. Exciting work. I took the liberty of forwarding your message to #C013Y4VG20J so they know about your progress.

Based on earlier discussions, this is about emotional and social support, and business advice and so on. Solo full stack developers have a whole set of different challenges without a team to rely on and bounce ideas off. It's not an offering of services.

Thank you Sean. Exactly. The channel is simply an environment for those building full-stack, Clojure/Script/Datomic systems on their own. That’s all. I can’t think of an aspect of the experience that wouldn’t be welcome here.

Ok. You're the author of the channel. Why would I want to take your advice? I'd take advice from seancorfield but you're very new for me and I don't yet know what to expect. This is the thing that I wanted to establish. For instance you posted some link to SST, which is a TypeScript thing and you didn't say pros and cons. And upon opening the webpage I saw that it supports... everything. So now that new solo developer will have 500 combinations to spend a week on. And this decreased your credibility in my eyes as this is not a pragmatic proposal but rather a "let's google something hastily and post fast just for content". For me this way of approach is feels mostly like some marketing guy would approach people -- initial energy and initial amazement. But what's after?

For instance the doc of SST triggers quite many suspicions. Let's say we view the section about databases: https://docs.sst.dev/databases Right of the bat it says: > The easiest one to configure is https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/ — a highly-performant NoSQL serverless database. Waaait a minute. Did it just suggested to try a massively scalable database that doesn't do proper joins? For a new guy? For a solo developer? Are we trying to do petabyte scale here? Solo guy? WTF... Literally: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36753861/how-can-i-join-tables-in-aws-dynamodb > You are correct, DynamoDB is not designed as a relational database and does not support join operations. This is not a reasonable thing to suggest in tutorial. You already have to know everything to use it. And this "beginner friendly" tutorial is a death trap for a beginner...

I don't want to roast anybody here but my only concern is that you didn't say what you can help with. And if you didn't say where you can help then you can't help anywhere. This is all I wanted to know. Maybe I'm toxic but I think I'm being reasonable here.

@U028ART884X You're completely misunderstanding the purpose of this channel -- and what Chip is saying. He's not offering to help you -- his "we" is the community -- as in "we can help each other" figure out the challenges of being solo full-stack developers by offering support and advice to each other. As for SST, I'm sure there's all sorts of hype on the web site, but for a lot of solo full-stack developers, building "everything" on the cloud is a given, and they're looking for curated systems to get them up and running, instead of having to figure out every single choice and learn how to put them all together. A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and he's mostly been a solo full-stack developer over his career and he tends to look for "low code" / "no code" solutions where possible so he can get stuff up and running -- and scalable -- with minimal effort. If you don't need those sorts of solutions -- because you're technical enough to make well-informed choices and you know how to assemble all the pieces -- then you're going to be aware of all the possible reasons why you wouldn't want to use them... but they do serve a market and they "work" for the people in those markets. As noted in the main channel: Biff is probably the closest in terms of integration but, as noted, assumes you'll be setting up server VMs rather than using AWS as the default.

Maybe. I think I misinterpreted things. To me too high energy is associated with danger. And it's immediately suspicious. Also I didn't see any Clojure experience and learning intent on LinkedIn so I wanted to know what it means.

Chip has posted plenty of detail about his background here -- it sounds like you just haven't read it? He's not very technical, but he sees the Clojure ecosystem as providing a lot of leverage (it does), allowing people to build powerful things very quickly, and he feels the Clojure community is (mostly!) very welcoming, patient, and helpful. That's why he's here and that's why he wants to build his product on top of Clojure. So he's a Clojure beginner -- with a vision as a solo entrepreneur -- who wants to create a sense of community around a very specific set of challenges: building scalable, complex applications, with minimal effort, when you're the only person working on it and you can't learn "everything".

This thread brilliantly illustrates why I’m here. Thank you both. Your level of engagement is humbling. I asked about SST out of ignorance. Given the general level of smarts in this community, I’m sure my lack of them can be a little jarring, even alarming. Sorry. I saw SST was TypeScript and wondered if someone knew of a full-stack resource that is Clojure-oriented. That’s all. (Well, as best I can tell that’s all. I learn new things about myself and my motivations everyday. Admittedly, most of what I have learned isn’t on LinkedIn. I do need to update it at some point, I guess.) “What do I need help with?” What don’t I need help with? If I had a magic wand, I would create a view of Life (my system) — a 50,000-meter view — that somehow magically allowed for drill-down and annotation. I wish I could present an https://youtu.be/Tiej8ops71c of the system that allowed people to draw on the walls. Folks inclined to help could see, consider, comment, and guide about things they could visualize. I think creating #life was my first attempt at laying things out. It’s a far cry from a VR experience. When I realized that building such a system solo isn’t quite a garden variety pursuit, I created #solo-full-stack in an attempt to build a community of folks with similar needs. If I’m the only one dealing with all this, the channel name is just as appropriate — maybe more appropriate. @U04V70XH6 is spot on. Thank you, Sean, for referencing your serial entrepreneur friend. Careful allocation of scant resources is everything and architecture is the driver. For me, entrepreneurship is a necessary burden because there are simply no other options of which I am aware. I’ve looked for years. I don’t like doing things alone. We all do what we have to do. Thank you for being here with me. It helps. Thank you for all your contributions so far. We all express our care differently. I deeply appreciate your expressions in all their varieties.