Top all-time · #3413
webapp.io
Company blog · webapp.io/blog · on HN as colinchartierprogrammingsystems
webapp.io is the company blog at webapp.io, writing about programming and systems. Since 2021, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this hosting company's engineering blog for posts on running Postgres in place of other queue and database tools, and on TimescaleDB use and crypto-mining abuse of free CI tiers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Webapp.io is a DevOps platform for developers of modern webapps.
Most-linked posts?
- Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- Automatic wildcard TLS with letsencrypt and a custom DNS server2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-10
- Storing Billions of VM Metrics with TimescaleDB2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-23
- /blog/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-12
- Webapp.io Is Shutting Down2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-16
What Hacker News says?
Author here! A few updates since this was published two years ago: - The service mentioned (now called https://webapp.io ) eventually made it into YC (S20) and still uses postgres as its pub/sub implementation, doing hundreds of thousands of messages per day. The postgres instance now runs on 32 cores and 128gb of memory and has scaled well. - We bolstered Postgres's PUBLISH with Redis pub/sub for high traffic code…
Comment linking /
on “Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)”Submitted Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019) as a story · 468 points
HN discussionWhat other examples are there of "single dependency stacks"? This article is really about the versatility and reliability of postgres. And I'm all in agreement. Reminiscent of: https://www.craigkerstiens.com/2017/04/30/why-postgres-five-... https://webapp.io/blog/postgres-is-the-answer/ http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enou... http://boringtechnology.club/ As much as HN could lead you astray w…
Comment linking /blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
on “Single dependency stacks”Submitted Run end-to-end tests faster with Firecracker as a story · 204 points
HN discussionJust a rebranding! (The technology's gotten better as well, of course - we didn't used to use firecracker at all) https://webapp.io/blog/layerci-has-rebranded-to-webapp-io/
Comment linking /blog/layerci-has-rebranded-to-webapp-io/
on “Run end-to-end tests faster with Firecracker”Submitted Storing Billions of VM Metrics with TimescaleDB as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis was the idea behind https://webapp.io (YC S20): - Run a linear series of steps - Watch which files are read (at the OS level) during each step, and snapshot the entire RAM/disk state of the MicroVM - When you next push, just skip ahead to the latest snapshot In practice this makes a generalized version of "cache keys" where you can snapshot the VM as it builds, and then restore the most appropriate snapshot for…
Comment linking /
on “Fast CI with MicroVMs”Submitted Show HN: Webapp.io - Free firecracker-based full-stack hosting as a story · 10 points
HN discussionHey, yeah this looks somewhat similar to what we're building at https://webapp.io (nee LayerCI, YC S20) We migrated to a fork of firecracker, but we're a fully hosted product that doesn't directly interact with GHA at all (similar to how CircleCI works), so there's some positioning difference between us and OP at the very least. Always happy to see innovation in the space :)
Comment linking /
on “Fast CI with MicroVMs”Submitted Automatic wildcard TLS with letsencrypt and a custom DNS server as a story · 7 points
HN discussionLove TimescaleDB, actually used it for one of our recent product feature launches: https://webapp.io/blog/storing-millions-of-vm-metrics-with-t...
Comment linking /blog/storing-millions-of-vm-metrics-with-timescaledb/
on “TimescaleDB 2.7 vs. PostgreSQL 14”Submitted Show HN: Catch layout and spelling mistakes at pull request time as a story · 7 points
HN discussionhttps://releasehub.com/ (Disclaimer, first listed because I work here) https://www.quali.com/ https://www.withcoherence.com/ https://webapp.io/ https://www.uffizzi.com/ https://www.qovery.com/ https://www.devzero.io/ These exist in the B2B space (and isn't an exhaustive list), there are a ton more in the B2C space
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Whats a Build vs. Buy decision that you got wrong?”Submitted PostgreSQL is a great pub/sub and job server (2019) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe Beta account is free and includes: > Three web apps on our globe-spanning serverless network, no matter how big. Plus, unlimited CI/CD time, and unlimited CDN. I wonder if they'll hit crypto mining issues as other CI/CD providers have recently [0]. Apparently, free tiers are not sustainable due to crypto mining attacks. --- [0] https://webapp.io/blog/crypto-miners-are-killing-free-ci/
Comment linking /blog/crypto-miners-are-killing-free-ci/
on “Show HN: 1-Click serverless hosting tool”Submitted On-demand wildcard TLS certificates as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI signed up and tried to authorize a single github repo, I received a '500 error' from https://webapp.io/api/after_github_oauth?code=&installation_...
Comment linking /api/after_github_oauth?code=&installation_id=&setup_action=install&state=
on “Show HN: Webapp.io - Free firecracker-based full-stack hosting”Submitted An ORDER BY statement improved our PostgreSQL query times by 100x as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYour Docs [0] and Examples[1] page, or many [2] other page in the footer for that matter, return a blank page? [0] https://webapp.io/docs/main [1] https://webapp.io/docs/examples [2] https://webapp.io/docs/integrations Firefox, latest version, no ad blocker enabled. After nosing around in your source a bit, it seems the redirect to https://docs.webapp.io doesn't work for me?
Comment linking /docs/integrations
on “Show HN: Webapp.io - Free firecracker-based full-stack hosting”Submitted Webapp.io Is Shutting Down as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnother article I saw on HN awhile back where someone did this: https://webapp.io/blog/postgres-is-the-answer/ I think its a reasonable option and the webapp.io people scaled it out pretty high. At Zapier we utilize RabbitMQ heavily and I cannot imagine scaling the amount of tasks we handle each day on postgres. This article mostly is lesson learns and misconfigurations of RabbitMQ though. Which is probably a good r…
Comment linking /blog/postgres-is-the-answer/
on “SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue”Submitted Webapp.io Is Shutting Down as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHey HN, Josh here. I’m a frontend developer at a devtools company, and I keep noticing obvious mistakes like typos and accessibility problems make it into production. I wanted to find something like pagespeed insights that would run against commits when they were first pushed, instead of after changes were deployed That’s why I built Website Linter, a zero-configuration tool that scrapes pages on your site to find l…
Comment linking /website-linter-report/0
on “Show HN: Catch layout and spelling mistakes at pull request time”Submitted Making a faster “Docker build” with FUSE as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://webapp.io/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Webapp.io Is Shutting Down”Submitted Running Cypress Tests in Parallel Using Docker Compose as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMy hobby is collecting corporate/startup engineering blogs. It tends to be the first link I open whenever I chance upon a new website. Here's are some of my favourites. https://cushionapp.com/blog/categories/journal https://blog.curtisherbert.com https://webapp.io/blog/ https://whimsical.com/blog https://informationisbeautiful.net/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Does your company have a engineering blog? Any tips for starting one?”
