Top all-time · #1223
Randall Degges
Personal blog · rdegges.com · on HN as rdeggesprogrammingstartupsweb
Randall Degges's personal blog at rdegges.com covers programming, startups and web. Since 2011, 56 different Hacker News readers have linked it 129 times, most often “Why I love basic auth (2015)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Randall Degges' blog for practical web and devops writing, including his case for HTTP Basic Auth, Postgres fuzzy text search, Heroku and Django configuration, and a startup retrospective.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls the retrospective a great writeup and appreciates people taking the time to share this kind of account.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal website of Randall Degges: programmer, speaker, author and entrepreneur.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I love basic auth (2015)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-06-19
- Sacrifice3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-03-29
- Please Stop Using Local Storage3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-28
- Obsessing Over Availability Is Dumb2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-12-30
- The Feature Snowball (2020)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-09
- DevOps Django - The Heroku Way2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-12-19
- On Programming Deadlines2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-24
- Deploying Django2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-31
- Service Oriented Problems (2012)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-17
- High Standards2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-04-02
What Hacker News says?
dont know whether the facebook bots execute javascript - https://www.rdegges.com/2017/how-to-monetize-your-website-wi...
Comment linking /2017/how-to-monetize-your-website-with-cryptocurrency-mining/
on “A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website”Submitted Heroku Isn't for Idiots: developer time and comparative advantage as a story · 237 points
HN discussionSad day, indeed. I remember meeting @craigkerstiens through Heroku -- I started using it back when they first released a beta Python buildpack. I also made friends with a ton of amazing people over the years through Heroku. It was a magical company with amazing engineers. Over the years I've written a lot about Heroku on my blog ( https://www.rdegges.com/ ), and even wrote a book on Heroku many years ago ( https://w…
Comment linking /
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted The Only Type of API Services I'll Use as a story · 210 points
HN discussionhttps://www.rdegges.com - a humble, personal blog. Built using Hugo and deployed via Netlify. Nothing fancy.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted The Positive Programmer as a story · 202 points
HN discussionFor fun: Why I Love Basic Auth: http://www.rdegges.com/why-i-love-basic-auth/
Comment linking /why-i-love-basic-auth/
on “OAuth Has Ruined Everything”Submitted How I Learned to Program as a story · 171 points
HN discussionI agree: https://www.rdegges.com/2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
Comment linking /2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
on “The complete guide to protecting your APIs with OAuth2”Submitted How I Program Stuff as a story · 165 points
HN discussionUpvoted. This is how Postgres supports "fuzzy searching" which helps with misspellings. https://www.rdegges.com/2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-... Completion response-time will be slower than Solr, Elasticsearch, Algolia, etc... but if you're already running Postgres, this may be the fastest to deliver for you.
Comment linking /2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-postgresql/
on “Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?”Submitted My Startup, a Retrospective as a story · 158 points
HN discussionAs a counterpoint, https://www.rdegges.com/2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
Comment linking /2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
on “Portier – An email-based, passwordless authentication service”Submitted Caller ID Made Simple as a story · 152 points
HN discussionI agree. I actually wrote something up about this back in 2015: https://www.rdegges.com/2015/obsessing-over-availability-is-...
Comment linking /2015/obsessing-over-availability-is-dumb/
on “Auth0 Has been down for almost 4 hours now”Submitted Tools I Use - tmux as a story · 140 points
HN discussionAt a high level, the rewrite included the following services: - opencnam-accounts (user accounts, and billing API) - opencnam-www (the public facing site and web portal) - opencnam-api (the developer API service) We're currently splitting the backend up into several other components as well, so in the end-game things will look more like this: - opencnam-www - opencnam-api - opencnam-auth (or possibly use Stormpath)…
Comment linking /service-oriented-problems/
on “My Startup, a Retrospective”Submitted The Heroku Hacker's Guide as a story · 137 points
HN discussionGreat writeup. I really appreciate when people take the time to do this. And also to risk dealing with the jackass criticism that usually comes from putting yourself out there on the internet. One thing that was underemphasized: They built in response to actual need, which was great. If you click through to the announcement post [1], he explains that he had spent 4 years doing telephony stuff, and was always bothere…
Comment linking /im-working-on-a-startup/
on “My Startup, a Retrospective”Submitted Never Stop Hacking as a story · 119 points
HN discussionHere's the article mentioned; https://www.rdegges.com/2018/to-30-billion-and-beyond/
Comment linking /2018/to-30-billion-and-beyond/
on “Ask HN: What highly scalable thing have you built with Go?”Submitted Heroku Isn't for Idiots as a story · 114 points
HN discussionEnvironment variables work extremely well when deploying on Heroku [1]. You can't exactly commit a local_settings.py file to your repo, so setting env variables is the only way to exclude sensitive keys and passwords from your source control. [1] http://rdegges.com/devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way
Comment linking /devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way
on “Django Settings for Production and Development: Best Practices”Submitted Why I'm Learning Node as a story · 79 points
HN discussionAh... Fuck. I feel like this is the signal I've been waiting for all these years :( Since 2006 (in uni), when I was first introduced to energy drinks, I've been more or less addicted to them ever since. I even go so far as to regulate my consumption of them in cycles to get the most I can out of it: https://www.rdegges.com/2011/my-use-and-abuse-of-caffeine/ I never really liked the taste of coffee much (without load…
Comment linking /2011/my-use-and-abuse-of-caffeine/
on “Slowly Poisoned by Energy Drinks”Submitted On Programming Deadlines as a story · 65 points
HN discussionHey all, so I'm one of the authors of postgression. The website isn't totally clear as to all the reasons why this may be useful. I've written a blog post about it, which you may also find helpful if you're interested: http://rdegges.com/postgression-a-postgresql-database-for-ev...
Comment linking /postgression-a-postgresql-database-for-every
on “Postgression - A PostgreSQL database for every test case”Submitted Successful GitHub Development as a story · 63 points
HN discussionPostgres can definitely do fuzzy matches! [0] https://www.rdegges.com/2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-...
Comment linking /2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-postgresql/
on “Ask HN: How should I build a simple marketplace website today?”Submitted DevOps Django - The Heroku Way as a story · 44 points
HN discussion
