Delegate non-vital tasks to other tools and services, you’ll thank me later, now the blog post.
Two years ago, I started delegating non-core tasks to paid services. The goal was to have more time to focus on development, I was sick of occasionally losing an entire day to some dev ops tasks. I was sick of even having to list them in my project management App.
I want to use my limited time to focus on the development, marketing, documentation, and everything else required for my Apps. I’m trying to launch a side business; that’s hard enough to do in your free time with small children, I don’t need “unnecessary” work as well.
Web servers
I used to use Azure to host all my projects and as easy as it is to use as Azure, it gets complicated quickly. When you have multiple Apps, need to manage SSL, CDN, MySQL, Redis and everything else, it starts taking up some serious time.
Eventually I’d had enough. I was also starting to get a little irritated with the price, Azure is not cheap. I contemplated AWS but decided no, I wanted something different. I’ve also read one too many horror stories of people almost going broke when they don’t set the correct spending limits on AWS.
I wanted a simpler life, so I thought ok, I’ll delegate the task and try Laravel Forge, I don’t want to have to manage anything.
All my sites were moved from Azure to Laravel Forge (Linode) in a weekend. I also took the opportunity to move some more of my domain names away from GoDaddy.
I was surprised at how different things were, particularly how quick and easy it was to get each of my Apps running. It only takes a few minutes to commission a server, point to a repo, deploy, and install an SSL certificate, it is incredible. I switched to Laravel Forge and Linode two years ago, I’ve never had a reason to think about switching to anything else.
Status Pages
It is a good idea to have a status page for your Apps, if something isn’t correctly working your customers at least have something to check before reaching out. There are countless ways to create a status page, you can do everything from a page which does a 200 check for each site to full-on integration.
It is easy to create a simple status page, but again, why bother? I searched around for a tool/service and found ‘oh dear.’ Initially I only signed up to create a status page but over time their offering has increased and I’m using all their features.
I don’t need to worry about maintaining my own status page and know when I get an email from oh dear, it means there is an issue I need to look at.
Delegate
This post is not about Laravel Forge, oh dear, Stripe, Freshbooks, TailwindUI or any other service I use personally.
If there are any tasks which you can afford to delegate to another service or tool, go for it.
We all have limited time so use it effectively. Concentrate on the stuff which relates to whatever your goal is, let others worry about the rest.