It is a wild day today. I got good news and bad news. The good news is that I fixed a nagging problem on my Robin Talks backend. Bad news is I got rejected for another two jobs.
When running Robin Talks on Vercel, I noticed that each invocation would take > 350 ms to run. And those were simple operations like authentication, getting a profile. While the same operations would run me about 20 ms on JobbedIn and Papersy. It took me a night of trying everything: removing CORS, wrapping NextJs around Hono, ditching Hono completely for NextJs. I basically lost sleep that night. Then this afternoon, after a good nap, I tried again, this time debugging my JobbedIn locally. Both of these apps took 140 ms for an auth + query call. But why were they performing differently on Vercel? I then took a look again at the logs and noticed something. Turns out, Robin Talks was deployed on a Washington server, while JobbedIn on Portland. Both apps use a Portland database. So that explained the drastic performance difference. So, I changed Robin Talks backend to be on Portland and matched performance with my old apps. This fixed the problem I had with Cloudflare (CF) deployment of Robin Talks as well, although with the Free plan, CF hated receiving multiple requests concurrently, so the instability was still there. I also learned that deploying NextJs is a pain on CF. I guess that's how Vercel gets ya.
The other news is two application rejections. I feel bummed being rejected a lot of times. It does wear a person's spirit. A question I want to ask? Why do every hiring people ask you if you have sold your apps / projects, whether there are actual users? Maybe I am slow but I was under the impression that "Projects" were for your personal projects. The things you did, wrote to learn, to enjoy, to showcase that you knew and experienced the technology. Is that not enough anymore? If I had projects that actual people used, with real numbers, why would I go work as an employee? Would I just live off that? Maybe that would explain a surge of founders, technical co-founders and the expectation inflation. Everyone expects everyone to build, ship, sell their products.
Hopefully somebody can answer me on that.