The Great Pyramids of the internet

Thanks to the Heroku debacle, I just asked this on Twitter:

Real question: If you needed to build a simple CRUD SaaS, but it has to last decades with minimal/no maintenance, how would you build it?

How do you build the internet equivalent of the Great Pyramids? What’s the internet building material equivalent of granite?

I think it’s something like this:

• Backend: PHP (or Rails, or Go)
• Database: MySQL, Postgresql
• Frontend: Plain vanilla HTML, CSS, JS
• Hosting: Your own VPS - Digital Ocean, Hertzner, Linode

Why:

• Anything built to last decades must have good backward compatibility. Programming language and database especially. Actually, anything that’s around 20 years ago and still commonly used today is a good choice. Like PHP.
• Other than actually owning your own server hardware, VPS is the closest you get to building on your own ‘land’ without anyone bothering you about fk all updates.
• As plain vanilla as you can, because frameworks have expiry dates. Founders leave, companies who started it get bored, bottomline shifts, people leave, nothing gets updated. Okay, maybe I can use jQuery LOL. I’m tempted by Tailwind though…
• Overall, just use old and boring tech. Internet primitives.
• Bonus: This actually would work really well with AI-assisted coding. The older a technology is, the more training data, the more accurate AI is.

Thing is, I’ve done it with frontend-only web apps that don’t do CRUD. Most of the free tools I made, like deadlink checker, were just HTML. And they last forever, no updates required. I love making those.

Now all I need is to move it just slightly to the next level, to be able to do CRUD tasks…

So Lifelog v2 will go retro.

Onwards!