I moved from Emacs org-mode to Obsidian with the help of the obsidian-tasks plugin, which lets you write queries for tasks similarly to Dataview. I used a few of those queries to build up an Agenda view that matched my custom agenda buffer in org-mode. I put together a little write up here: https://davi.sh/blog/2022/01/obsidian-one/
Stripe was founded by Patrick and John Collison. I’m guessing you’re confusing it with Square, another payments company, which was co-founded and still run by Jack Dorsey.
I think we can look to mobile to see how feasible this might be: consistently over the past decade, iPhones have matched or exceeded Android performance with noticeably smaller capacity batteries. A-series chips and Qualcomm chips are both ARM. Apple's tight integration comes with a cost when it comes to flexibility, and, you can argue, developer experience, but it's clearly not just the silicon itself that leads to the performance we're seeing in the M1 Macs.
If you're used to SPA-style frontend development with React, Vue, or any similar framework, then yes, this will probably be a big mental/development shift.
Turbolinks (the project at Basecamp that Hotwire grew out of, now it seems it's called Turbo Drive) was a way to bring single-page style load times to traditional, server-rendered apps. Hotwire is the evolution of that: Turbo Frames let you dynamically replace certain parts of the page on the frontend, rather than having to throw the baby out with the bathwater on every page action. If you're used to developing server-rendered applications without much JavaScript using Ruby on Rails, Django, or a similar "batteries included" backend framework, then you'll be able to add a more dynamic feel to your web app without much of a mental shift: certain template partials (basically the components of your frontend) will be wrapped in this `turbo-frame` HTML tag, which will be slotted in to your page dynamically by Turbo.
Shouldn't be too difficult to hook this up to a build command for hugo, jekyll, or whichever static site generator you'd prefer. But this gets away from the self-hosted part of what you were saying a bit.
You could use GitHub actions to do the build and send it off to some CDN to deploy, or if you were self-hosting the whole thing, you could have a Flask app listen for a webhook and re-build your site when that's received. Or simply pull in from the git origin and rebuild with a cron job.
Netlify CMS uses the GitHub (or bitbucket, etc) API to modify your repository with the new/updated content. You can self-host the entire system, or have netlify handle the GitHub auth while you self host your website.
I think it's difficult to say how many merchants went from hosting their own e-commerce site that engineers built for them from scratch, and transitioned to Etsy, Ebay, etc., laying off the developers they hired in the process. Without numbers to back myself up, I would say that there are certainly many more developers and engineers working on E-Commerce today than ten or twenty years ago. Services like Stripe certainly help businesses focus less on setting up common parts of a website or online business, but that just leaves people more time to focus on the "business logic" that is unique to them.
The "current stack" may certainly be ripe for disruption. But I'd predict that rather than put developers out of work, it will simply bring even more businesses into the fold who may not have had the resources for developing their own solutions beforehand. There will always be companies with the resources to demand custom solutions to fit their particular business needs.
Looks like your profile just has an hnchat verification code, but would love to check out the project and help out if I can. It sounds really interesting!
Thanks for sharing your story, Sahil. Something I was wondering: do you think that Gumroad could have gotten to where it was without raising money to begin with? You mentioned sales not really changing with or whithout a sales team, but do you think you could have developed Gumroad in the beginning with a smaller group of developers, or even just by yourself?
I'm still trying to make writing regularly more of a habit. I don't have much of a backlog of topics, so trying to work on that a bit.