18 ms·
What struck me the most is going with the old and tried tools (PHP+MySQL). Nowadays everyone - myself included - is trying to have an excuse to try the sexiest
by tzaman 10y ago
What struck me the most is going with the old and tried tools (PHP+MySQL). Nowadays everyone - myself included - is trying to have an excuse to try the sexiest JS framework of the day and most of us fail miserably to deliver anything useful - because of lack of experience or just reinventing the wheel altogether.
Old and boring is still sometimes the best.
- wavefunction 10y agoThere's something to be said for working with the tools you're familiar with but I am also quite happy to have put my PHP development in the rear-view long ago.
- outworlder 10y agoThat was the first thing I thought when I hit the URL. Here's the thing, I'm guilty as charged. But, analyzing my own behavior, trying the sexiest (JS or otherwise) framework is just an excuse to play/learn it. My subconscious mind never had the intention of actually following through with a product... I hope we can recognize (and avoid) the pattern in the future and use whatever we are more comfortable with to rush the product out of the door.
- old-gregg 10y ago... yet when I tried to use it, it gave me "Firefox is not supported. Use Chrome". Feels like 2001 indeed.
- tzaman 10y agoand yet he's making $15k a month off this project. Imagine the growth possibilities! :)
- endless1234 10y ago$3500 in his first week after media publicity, not $15k per month consistently.
- outworlder 10y agoGot the same, switched to Chrome, took me a second. Worth it. I bet this is on the roadmap.
- pix64 10y agoI ignored it, worked fine for me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dawsonwhitfield 10y agoFirefox has known issues with svg I'm sure we can get around them, but not in v1
- elmigranto 10y ago> Old and boring is still sometimes the best. It's not so much old vs new, or cool vs boring, but rather the thing you are most experienced with. If the goal is to just build the damn thing, go with a stack you would be most productive in.
- PerfectElement 10y agoExactly. I'm making 25k month with a SaaS that was built on boring ASP.NET+SQL Server+Angular 1 because that's what I knew. I host it on Windows because I know how to make it fast and secure. I'm happy I focused all my time on building the features that clients were asking for, instead of learning the latest frameworks or fighting an OS I'm not familiar with.
- throwaway29464 10y agoYes - I'm doing about 33K per month on a SaaS that is just Rails/Postgres/Heroku - the only javascript is some basic JQuery.
- whitepoplar 10y agoCool! Can I ask what your SaaS is?
- kowdermeister 10y agoHe is called throwaway29464 for a reason :)
- smnplk 10y agoAmateur. I make about 35k/month using only bash via CGI and some plain text files as database.
- vivekian2 10y agoSerious? or joking? :) If the former, would love to know more.
- meta_AU 10y agoThere is a lot to be said for the adage: do something new or try a new tool, but never at the same time.
- dermotbrennan 10y agoIntel would agree with that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-Tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-Tock_model
- bdcravens 10y agoEnvision I believe still runs a ColdFusion backend.
- prawn 10y agoSmall correction - it's InVision. https://www.invisionapp.com/ https://www.invisionapp.com/ Its co-founder and lead engineer is/was very prolific in the ColdFusion community. https://www.bennadel.com/ https://www.bennadel.com/
- bdcravens 10y agoIf his Github account is any indication, still pretty involved: https://github.com/bennadel/ColdFusion-Circuit-Breaker https://github.com/bennadel/ColdFusion-Circuit-Breaker
- noblethrasher 10y agoProgramming languages and systems are basically theorems. The nice thing about theorems is that even when they're old, they're still theorems.
- williamle8300 10y agoAh. I dig this. Wish I had more upvotes!
- oaktowner 10y agoI gave him/her an extra for you.
- frozenport 10y agoNo, because they can literally not run, or contain security vulnerabilities.
- joakleaf 10y agoI don't completely agree. To follow your analogy, I don't think the languages themselves are "theorems". Rather they are notation. Some notation is shorthand. Some is quite verbose. But in the end it is not the notation that makes or break a theorem. However, a theorem may be more or less clear depending on the notation.
- asimjalis 10y agoI would posit that it is not old vs new but the vision you have of what you are building. If he had used ClojureScript this would still be just as good. If someone uses PHP and jQuery on an uninspired vision it will not be very good.
- innocentoldguy 10y agoFor me the biggest issue is motivation, rather than old and boring vs. new and shiny. More than what I know, it's about what makes me happy. I'm sure people build awesome things in one Javascript du jour framework or another every day, but I'm just not one of them. I know Javascript and Node.js fairly well, but I don't find any joy in programming in them. Whenever I make the effort, my motivation always dies off and I either abandon the project, or rewrite it in something else. Anything else. On the other hand, technologies like Elixir, Erlang, Elm, and Riak, for instance, are immensely enjoyable to me, so they keep my motivation alive. In my opinion, whatever makes you happy and motivated is the best.
- smegel 10y agoGood ideas executed well are the best regardless of what tech stack you are using.
- mattbeckman 10y agoAt work, we've been using a new JS framework paired with server-less infrastructure for the past 9 months. It's barely production stable, so it's been painful, but hey look at our fancy new framework. When I started a new side project, I wanted to get an MVP out as quickly as possible. I opted for PHP/MySQL, and development time felt like lightning. It was so refreshing. I plan on rebuilding the code base, now that the side project is making money, and perhaps I can use newer tech for that, but quite happy sticking with PHP for MVPs.
- madebysquares 10y agoI have a similar story I recently set out to build a SaaS product and wanted to use/learn elixir. I enjoyed using elixir but a lot of the fairly complex things I wanted to do requires quite a bit of learning and custom solutions. I wound up scraping that version after 2 months and rewriting it in Ruby/Rails in about a week. And adding new features.
- apeacox 10y agoI did the exact opposite: I have ~8years of professional ruby/rails experience and I was building a little SaaS. At some point, after 100 hours, I got bored/stuck with only 20% of the planned features to reach a MVP. I decided to switch to elixir/phoenix, where I had few confidence and there was apparently a growing ecosystem not always ready or complete. After 100 hours I completed the MVP and launched it. Using elixir was refreshing and right now I'm using it for almost all my side projects/prototypes.
- downandout 10y agoOne of the hardest things for programmers to learn (including myself) is that success is almost entirely determined by how well your solution solves the problem you're aiming at, and how well you market it. The tools you use to create your solution matter to almost nobody. It's true that if the company really grows, scalability, code manageability for teams etc. might become an issue if your backend is very poorly engineered, but that's the exception to the rule. As long as it works, it's good enough to launch with.
- jordz 10y agoThis is absolutely bang on the money. Totally right!
- rovr138 10y ago> It's true that if the company really grows, scalability, code manageability for teams etc. might become an issue if your backend is very poorly engineered, but that's the exception to the rule. As long as it works, it's good enough to launch with. I think concentrating on the main features and launch quickly is good. You can start getting feedback and doing what customers or potential ones want.
- ashazar 10y ago> Nowadays everyone - myself included - is trying to have an excuse to try the sexiest JS framework of the day and most of us fail miserably to deliver anything useful - because of lack of experience or just reinventing the wheel altogether. That reminded me the article titled "How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016" https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f#.s9l9652ug https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628921
- T-hawk 10y agoAnd of course, that very page railing against Javascript overcomplexity itself loads 400 KB of script bundles.
- arkitaip 10y ago400 kb is considered super lean these days...
- andrewvijay 10y agoIt depends on your target audience. If first world countries with good internet, then its lean. If not then ok on a desktop. Very bad in a mobile.
- icelancer 10y agoWe ship $2+ million/year through WooCommerce/Wordpress and a PHP/MySQL backend on Digital Ocean servers. It's enjoyable to come on Hacker News and read the thrashing about new technologies and the like.
- odbol_ 10y agoI don't think PHP has anything to do with that. Probably more experienced coders (i.e. older, hence PHP), just cranking out great code. Language/stack has nothing to do with it. For example, my day job I work with Android all day long. But as a side project, I wanted to make a small mobile game as a invitation for my wedding. So I loaded up Phaser.io and wrote some really easy Javascript. I had a working, playable game that night. To be fair, it's a really great framework. But I think choosing a framework that fits your needs at hand is much more crucial than which language or database you use.
- charlesdm 10y agoWho cares if it's old and boring? Making money is what you need to do as an entrepreneur (by improving your product and delivering more value), not playing around with various "sexy" technologies. I would write something in COBOL if it made sense to do (i.e. faster, more efficient, w/e) Personally I don't really enjoy the development work on the "for profit" projects I build. I love seeing a finished product, though. Use the sexy untested tech for a "fun project", not a commercial one.
- nodesocket 10y agoWhile the backend might be what you call "old" PHP/MySQL, the design and front-end (UI/UX) is extremely good and modern.
- wyck 10y agoImagine your in the cleaning business and you focus all your efforts into making the most light weight durable broom in the world and one day you wake up and realise the guy with the wooden broom has all the actual business. In this case some developers actual go further down the tool rabbit hole and start building tools that build tools..and they wonder why they fail.
- bbcbasic 10y agoNice analogy. Not sure why this is downvoted.
- aclsid 10y agoI noticed the same thing. Was previously working on a startup using PHP/MySQL/Backbone. We just kept churning out releases out of management's ever changing specs. After a while with the chatbot hype, in comes this external contractor, and started dismissing people left and right that either did not code in javascript or wanted to use his simplistic challenge/response chatbot (we coded a decision tree based system). In any case, at that stage the startup was failing, I ended up leaving, kept working with same cooling in my own startup and have been happy ever since. So for me, the moral of the story is, work for somebody that is focused on the product instead of trying to win a hipster contest. First time I saw that was when .NET was in beta mode and our tech lead decided to switch everything over to an undocumented/buggy system back then.