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Randall Degges

Personal blog · rdegges.com · on HN as rdeggesprogrammingstartups

Randall Degges's personal blog at rdegges.com covers programming and startups. 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.

Visit the blog
129mentions?
56HN people?
2011–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 31 in 2012

The personal website of Randall Degges: programmer, speaker, author and entrepreneur.

The author on HN?

rdegges · 3,526 karma · member since 2012

meet.hn/city/us-Bend Socials: - github.com/rdegges - linkedin.com/in/rdegges - reddit.com/user/rdegges - instagram.com/randalldegges - https://bsky.app/profile/rdegges.com --- I'm just a happy programmer that likes to hack stuff. You can contact me via my site: https://www.rdegges.com/ or via email r@rdegges.com

From their public HN profile, which links to this site.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Why I love basic auth (2015)
    7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-06-19
  2. Sacrifice
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-03-29
  3. Please Stop Using Local Storage
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-28
  4. Obsessing Over Availability Is Dumb
    2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-12-30
  5. The Feature Snowball (2020)
    2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-09
  6. Hack Everything to Pieces
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-12
  7. Authentication Still Sucks (2017)
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-24
  8. Deploying Django
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-31
  9. DevOps Django - The Heroku Way
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-12-19
  10. Heroku Isn't for Idiots
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-16

What Hacker News says?

  1. 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”
  2. Submitted Heroku Isn't for Idiots: developer time and comparative advantage as a story · 237 points

    HN discussion
  3. Sad 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”
  4. Submitted The Only Type of API Services I'll Use as a story · 210 points

    HN discussion
  5. https://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”
  6. Submitted The Positive Programmer as a story · 202 points

    HN discussion
  7. For 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”
  8. Submitted How I Learned to Program as a story · 171 points

    HN discussion
  9. I 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”
  10. Submitted How I Program Stuff as a story · 165 points

    HN discussion
  11. Upvoted. 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?”
  12. Submitted My Startup, a Retrospective as a story · 158 points

    HN discussion
  13. As 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”
  14. Submitted Caller ID Made Simple as a story · 152 points

    HN discussion
  15. I 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”
  16. Submitted Tools I Use - tmux as a story · 140 points

    HN discussion
  17. At 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”
  18. Submitted The Heroku Hacker's Guide as a story · 137 points

    HN discussion
  19. Great 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”
  20. Submitted Never Stop Hacking as a story · 119 points

    HN discussion
  21. Here'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?”
  22. Submitted Heroku Isn't for Idiots as a story · 114 points

    HN discussion
  23. Environment 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”
  24. Submitted Why I'm Learning Node as a story · 79 points

    HN discussion
  25. Ah... 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”
  26. Submitted On Programming Deadlines as a story · 65 points

    HN discussion
  27. Hey 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”
  28. Submitted Successful GitHub Development as a story · 63 points

    HN discussion
  29. Postgres 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?”
  30. Submitted DevOps Django - The Heroku Way as a story · 44 points

    HN discussion

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