Sophie Scholl's last words were, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Hans Scholl's last words shouted from the guillotine were, ”Long live freedom!”
i think we need to define what a "productized service" is.
they are not: apps, saas, products (books, courses,..), fixed bids on custom projekts or anything you bill by the hour.
a productized service is:
something you do very well, has a very narrow and fixed scope, you normally would bill this by the hour. think of it like writing a custom proposal but sell it to anyone at the same price.
some examples:
- i change the car oil for x usd.
- checking a website for responsiveness and show you the biggest mistakes and how to fix them for x usd. (website teardown)
- a/b testing an online shop to increase conversion by 5%
i myself am in the middle of turning my freelance sysadmin/devops business into a productized service, so i am eager to hear what ppl on hn had success with - and what did not work out for them.
on servers i run a couple of homebrew shell scripts to do backups. on some i use the backup-gem (https://github.com/backup/backup)
on my workstation/notebook (both apple computers) i use time machine with different external harddrives i rotate weekly.
all setups run automated, but sometimes i trigger them manually (usually right before and/or after some major change in configuration, or when lots of new data are on the drives (eg: i copy all the holliday photos onto my laptop)
i run regular checks on server backups, e.g. check if they "are there" and if i could restore them properly if needed.