15 ms·

What tech stacks are indie hackers using for their apps, and why?

230 points by ChanningAllen 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
berti 8y ago
C++/Qt for GUI, Go or Python for backend, Python for misc scripts/prototypes, C for uCs. They are all well trodden paths with plenty of good libraries available, and good tooling available. I have spent a bit of time playing with Zig most recently, it could finally replace C for me!
holografix 8y ago
Python, Django/WagtailCMS, React+Redux, Redis and RedisQ, Postgres, Kafka, Docker + Compose for local dev. Visual Studio Code. Tempted to learn a 2nd language well, thinking Go but curious about the experience of Kotlin + IntelliJ
tephra 8y ago
Web: typescript frontend and phoenix (Elixir) backend is My new setup. Apps: Flutter and if I need it switch to native. But flutter is really good for my simple needs!
lkrubner 8y ago
I’ve a small side project I’m working on. I am writing the backend in Clojure and then deploy with Jenkins using the Groovy DSL — it’s useful that everything runs on the JVM. The Jenkins code calls Terraform to set up the servers, drawing on optimized AMIs I set up with Packer. I avoid Docker for all the reasons I’ve written about elsewhere (you can Google if you’re interested). Packer does everything that people would otherwise use Docker for. For now the frontend is plain HTML and jQuery. I haven’t done the mobile app yet so no need for Angular/Cordova or React.
- stevenhuang 8y ago
  Link for others: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous-gamble-which-we-will-regret http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous... It was a great--thanks.
noncoml 8y ago
For the backend I start with Node, then get tired of the runtime errors and switch to Go. Go is cool but soon I get tired of writing “if err == nil” so I switch to Haskell. Haskell is nice but soon I get tired of not finding decent libraries for some not very popular things that I use, so I say fuck it and go to rails. Ruby is nice and Rails feels well thought out and solid, but then I can’t help be annoyed that it’s not fast, so fuck it, I switch to Rust. I get tired of lifetimes and wrapping everything in RefCells so I switch to Erlang. Erlang is cool and all, but no fucking meta programming. Sucks, let’s try Lisp... I am not making fast progress, I think the problem is my keyboard, I should try buying that Ducky one I have been eyeing for quite a while.
- newen 8y ago
  Check out Elixir. It's Erlang with metaprogramming.
  - 83457 8y ago
    I thought it was Ruby with Erlang... or was it Erlang with Ruby.. bah
    - newen 8y ago
      Erlang with Ruby-like syntax plus macros..something like that. It compiles to the same VM as Erlang's and has almost all of the same semantics as Erlang.
- nso95 8y ago
  Just pick something and stick with it, every technology has its problems.
  - noncoml 8y ago
    You are right! I should stick with Scala. It will also give me the opportunity to learn a new language! Play looks good, but maybe I should go with Scalatra instead? Should I be using Slick? It's quite different than any ORM I used so far, maybe I should bake my own Scala ORM. OK then, here we go. One more decision, REST or GraphQL? GraphQL seems to be the future. Let's go with that. Man, types are nice and Scala's type system is powerful, but sometimes I wish I had the flexibility of a dynamic language. It would make prototyping much faster. Fuck it, "git checkout -b node_v2"
briandear 8y ago
Swift Vapor + PostgreSQL and you're done.
zhobbs 8y ago
For my recent projects, I've used Go + DynamoDB for a GraphQL backend, and Next.JS with SSR on the frontend. Deploying both to lambda with Apex Up. Stripe for billing, SendGrid for transactional email.
- 11235813213455 8y ago
  "Next.JS with SSR on the frontend" I call that backend, and node is pretty good for graphql too (graphql-js), full JS make a lot of sense (add flow/TS to get more type-strength)
- dpeck 8y ago
  Any tips on the go/dynamodb side of things? I’ve looked at it and experimented a little and it seems quite easy to get data into dynamodb and quite convoluted to get it out.
  - zhobbs 8y ago
    I'm using https://github.com/guregu/dynamo https://github.com/guregu/dynamo for the data reading/writing. In my experience, the trick with Dynamo is the schema design. I haven't had problems with the libraries/queries as long as the schema made sense for how I'd be accessing the data.
duncan-donuts 8y ago
My side project is using Rails, React, Postgres, and deployed to heroku. There’s nothing flashy but I can prototype quickly and it’s easy for 2 people to manage.
- troycarlson 8y ago
  Same here.
neeleshs 8y ago
Django, Postgres RDS on elastic beanstalk, with some SNS use. Vue+vuex on the front end. Gitlab CI/CD for deployment Extremely fast dev/deployment turnaround time with Django and Beanstalk. Vue/vuex is simple enough for me to understand and build SPA
- konschubert 8y ago
  That's my stack as well. But sure you mean SNS, not SQS? Though I have been thinking if I should replace elastic beanstalk with Kubernetes, since it seems to become the non-proprietary standard for deploying containers?
  - neeleshs 8y ago
    I do mean SNS. Though at some point, I may switch to SQS or rabbitmq. SNS is "good enough" for my use cases and I don't have to run a beanstalk worker (like for sqs). I chose beanstalk because of how dead simple it is. It is non-standard in a way, but was the fastest way to get the app out. Again, I know the app may outgrow it's needs at some point. At that point I'll invest time to move it out to the flavor of the day:).
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  what are you using for css? Bootstrap? Bulma? Or some other library?
  - neeleshs 8y ago
    A 20$ admin theme from themeforest, based on bootstrap3. Nice enough that it does not warrant massive re-styling right now. If the app becomes bit of a success, we'll outsource this part to more competent people ( me and partner are both backend-ish people)
- bash-j 8y ago
  Is there a guide on the internet that would help me figure out how to use Vue with Django? I tried a couple last month but they were poorly structured or didn't explain enough about what they were doing, and since I'm not great at JavaScript I gave up..
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rikkipitt 8y ago
Thanks for the featuring my side project https://www.inviewapp.com https://www.inviewapp.com Channing!
passivepinetree 8y ago
Over and over again I keep hearing the advice to "build using what you know." How do I separate what might be a side project to learn a new stack from a side project that might eventually make money?
- clintonb 8y ago
  Prioritize. If your goal is to get something out quickly and make money, use what you know. If your goal is to learn a new stack, learn the new stack. If you learn enough to comfortably release to customers, do it; otherwise, either get comfortable or rebuild.
- Mc_Big_G 8y ago
  I had to make this decision recently and my conclusion was if your goal is to build something that makes money, do it with what you know. Why? Because you can spend 100% of your time building instead of 50/50 learning/building (or worse). Projects with the goal of being a business should iterate and fail fast. If you win the app lottery and actually build something people will pay for, they won't want to wait for you to learn while you build it out. Someone else will do it with some "old" tech like ruby on rails and take your customers and revenue. Spend your time working on the business, not the tech. Developers think code is important but the reality is that it almost doesn't matter. You can build something successful with the worst tech decisions imaginable. I know it's hard to accept but it's true. I've personally witnessed an absolute frankenstein's monster app, made of a mish-mash of what are now considered the worst technologies, get sold for $30+ million and the founders retired to the Caribbean where the build a mansion and an upscale restaurant just for fun. I pity the people devs who have to inherit that, but the value wasn't in the tech and it almost never is.
  - i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
    If you're spending 100% of your time building you're doing it wrong anyway. I feel like this is just missing so much conte xt. If you are working full time and can hack in your after hours to learn a new tech stack first and then start your project there might be an aggregate benefit over just starting the project right away using what you know. Context matters to a huge degree in these kinds of discussions. I feel like people just like to give blanket statement advice.
1996 8y ago
Python for the code, Postgres for the backend, Markdown for the frontend. Because I am too lazy to reinvent the wheel, and most of that is good enough. I would have much preferred to use Perl, R, dotnet, or just about anything else, but there was an already made library in Python that was good enough for 90% of my needs, and 100% with some elbow grease, so my lazyness made me learn Python instead! But wait- it gets dirtier than this! The code is done is Vi, with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups), and deployed to servers by manual SCP, with no automatic tests, no care about CD or automatization - yet: as I need more and more servers, I realize I have to spend time learning say ansible to provision them faster than a copy paste of bash (I have low standards but I won't do curl|bash, just... no) but I am delaying that as much as possible to concentate on implementation. The servers are on Debian VMs on Azure, just because they gave me free credits and do not perform as bad as AWS. When the free credits run out, I will move to DO. Then I will see what else I can use, and that will be the right time to care about ansible or whatever. It is as ugly as I can get away with to get my MVP out, using tech from 1996 lol.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups) I get the simplicity...but using git/hg/svn is just so easy. And you can easily rewind, diff, view changelogs for a file, etc.
  - 1996 8y ago
    git takes typing more commands and bothering about the repo. rsync is run by cron.
    - darpa_escapee 8y ago
      If you want to do something dirty, you could schedule commits with cron.
  - nlowell 8y ago
    I am not convinced that git is easy... I believe it's very powerful if you put the time into learning it, but anything with 50,000 separate guides on the internet must be somewhat unintuitive, right?
EliRivers 8y ago
C++, Qt and some OS API. I'm not in web apps.
- copperx 8y ago
  You're a very fortunate person. Count your blessings.
- jcelerier 8y ago
  Same stack ! happily hacking on a DAW for interactive art - https://ossia.io https://ossia.io
Aegis11 8y ago
Vue.js on the front end with MongoDB Stitch handling authentication and database storage. Deployed to AWS but started using Netlify and loving it.
im_cynical 8y ago
Currently been working on a web app for about 8 months. Python for the backend under the argument of "build using what you know". ReactJS for frontend development because Python for frontend work I find very antiquated. Architecture wise I'm hosted in AWS. Data is stored in MySQL and Redis. All self hosted because I'm to cheap to pay per request pricing and the overhead is very minor when done right when rolling my own
- kimdotcom 8y ago
  How much RAM do you allocate to Redis?
  - im_cynical 8y ago
    My current indie web app is still in development so final numbers for prod are TBD. However I'm using it for * Storing time counters on user actions (timestamp of last time a user posted/edited X, meant to be a throttling mechanism against abuse) * Site content caching, around 20-50kb per page, each page being user generated content Sizes will obviously vary on traction so not sure about the final numbers. ---- My last 9-to-5 employer was a very well known and my largest caching tier in Redis there was 512GB in a cluster configuration. I'm using the same server configuration and sharding logic for the indie thing, just on a smaller scale
- lilcorey10 8y ago
  Excuse the ignorance, but how do you tie the React in with Python? Are they 2 standalone apps that communicate RESTfully?
sorrymate 8y ago
React/Redux frontend and .Net Core for backend API. The site takes advantage of Server-Side Rendering and Lazy Loading based on Routes/components. Authentication is built into the App with JWT and Authorize attributes on controllers.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Python and Cython, flask, gunicorn, various ML frameworks, Postgres for web services. Python with Cython because this allows extremely nice flexibility between concise, expressive code and low-level targeted performance optimization. Flask with gunicorn has scaled extremely well for us, but there are many good alternatives. Postgres because flexibility with customizations and data types in the database has been the most important thing for us.
jimmy1 8y ago
Go and, honestly, sqlite with backups written to S3. It's the absolute cheapest. I can run multiple apps on a t2.nano (t2.micro if I am feeling fancy). My apps cost something like $1.50 to run a month, and they can easily handle medium-sized traffic, plus Go is just so dead simple to deploy. scp a build binary, and boom I am done. Once the app grows and more collaboration/developers/requirements call for it, I will add more infrastructure.
- copperx 8y ago
  What Go libraries do you use?
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    Mainly the stdlib, see above answer. Exceptions are logging auth, and sql driver.
    - andreygrehov 8y ago
      Which one do you use for auth? Any recommendations?
      - jimmy1 8y ago
        I really like goth https://github.com/markbates/goth https://github.com/markbates/goth
- startupdiscuss 8y ago
  Do you use a framework? Do you do everything server side with Go or do you have a JS library on the front-end?
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    net/http and REST api all the way down, I for the most part try to stick to the stdlib as much as possible. The few exceptions are logging (I like zerolog) the sql driver, and auth. I do keep the front/backend separation because doing site hosting in S3 with a cloudfront cache is pennies on the dollar (.63 cents a month) and I tend to lean towards using vue.js more these days. I have been known to just serve the html statically directly from go as well, and use go templates in the past, and use minimal jquery where it's needed (I still like jquery :-/, not everything needs to be full-blown SPA-mode)
RandomBK 8y ago
I use multiplatform Kotlin to compile shared business logic to JVM and Javascript. The frontend then uses Typescript+React/Redux while the backend is a Kotlin Spring app with Postgres.
- FragenAntworten 8y ago
  How are you handling authentication? OAuth 2 with Spring Security, or something else?
  - leonroy 8y ago
    Not the OP but I started with cookie based auth and Spring Security and then moved to OAuth 2 - it’s extremely painless to setup (100 lines of code at most) but it did take a while to understand it all. The Baeldung Spring Security course helped a lot. If in a hurry though you can always use an external service like Auth0. I had that setup in an afternoon whereas understanding OAuth 2 and Spring Security took a week.
    - FragenAntworten 8y ago
      Thanks! I'll check that course out.
munchbunny 8y ago
For getting web apps up fast, React, Firebase, Git, and Heroku. It's a well trodden path so the tooling is simple and the components are reliable. For my VR stuff... Unity is really the only choice that's fast to get off the ground, so Unity it is. For hacking together backend heavy stuff, Python. Flask if I need to expose an API endpoint. Postgres if I need a real database, sqlite if I don't. Deployed to my evergreen playpen virtual instance via Docker containers because it's, once again, a well trodden, simple, and undramatic path.
- foota 8y ago
  I'm curious, I've started doing development in unity but I find myself unaware of good patterns to use, any pointers to advice on unity design patterns?
  - munchbunny 8y ago
    Unity is pretty squarely in the space of event based programming, so whatever design patterns apply there are generally useful. Because of stuff like animations making timelines unpredictable, you should embrace the event based approach as much as possible. Other than that, try your best to decouple game state from the actual objects that are flying around. You will never do it 100%, but the more egregious Unity code I've seen all shares the trait that they just jammed variables into scripts for objects without really thinking about how they'd tie together a distributed network of objects that have no easy way of addressing each other. The answer is that you don't: you still need a central game state.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  Do you use firebase auth? It looks really good. I just had a heck of a time implementing user management and a couple oauth2 flows and it looks like it could have saved me a bit of time. My only concern is their plans are a little weird, it just jumps from free tier to jumbo size, wish there was something a little in between for less money.
  - munchbunny 8y ago
meesterdude 8y ago
Wow, lots of Vue mentioned! I was expecting mostly react, but surprised to see there was actually some pushback against it. > I've heard React described as "10 times as much work for a 20% better user experience", and I think that's about right (maybe not 10x, but probably 2x) I thought this was a gem.
startupdiscuss 8y ago
I haven't done an official count (comments plus the site) but a very strong showing for full stack Rails or Django, and when people do stick in a front end it is usually React or Vue.
motohagiography 8y ago
Flask (hosted by pythonanywhere) and Neo4j from Graphene. Chose both because I wanted consistency between the abstraction of my business logic, and the spec of my implementation. I get some chippy guff about using graphs, but by taking the time to define my business logic as a grammar, expressing that grammar as a graph, then implementing it directly into the model, I get a lot of "aha," moments from potential customers. Graphs can be analogous to functional languages in that if you are using them, there is a higher likelyhood you've reasoned something through before implementing it.
- 83457 8y ago
  Can you provide more info about your graph approach? Thanks!
  - motohagiography 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)
HugoDaniel 8y ago
For https://gridgenerator.com https://gridgenerator.com I am using: - Tachyons CSS - InfernoJS - Typescript - Node.js (with express and postgraphile) - PostgreSQL - Nginx - DragonflyBSD
- wildrhythms 8y ago
  Are you using Typescript for frontend or backend (or both)?
  - HugoDaniel 8y ago
    Mostly front-end: https://github.com/HugoDaniel/gridgenerator https://github.com/HugoDaniel/gridgenerator But the video producer/converter is also in TS (in that same repo). It produces your making-of videos like these: https://gridgenerator.com/static/37.mp4 https://gridgenerator.com/static/37.mp4
Klonoar 8y ago
I actually wound up building most of my current project in Rust, on top of actix-web. Partly because I'm apparently a masochist, but also because... I mean c'mon, modern architecture is CRUD and job queues. Rust can do that fine if you don't get distracted by the bells and whistles. I ripped out and open sourced my user-module stuff for authentication handling, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/jelly https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/jelly
leon_sbt 8y ago
My software dev path: Didn't know anything serious about web dev/software systems 12 months ago. So if my stack seems shiny, I just picked what many people on Medium/Hacker News were talking/raving about. Front-end: React SPA (Via Create React App),Redux, React-Bootstrap Why: I had no prior framework experience, single command setup, and plenty questions on Stack Overflow and Medium articles to learn with. Going the plain Javascript route with no frame work,seemed like I would be on a slippery slope for spaghetti code down the line. React's one-way data flow and component architecture made things incredibly easy to mentally digest. I found React's documentation VERY well organized and explained, and Vue's documentation was intimidating when compared to React. Version Control: BitBucket Git Why: Free private tier for solo use and enjoyed previous experience with Atlassian products CI/CD: BitBucket Pipelines Why: Already using Bitbucket, this just worked seamlessly with it. Only $10 for 1000 more build minutes. Firebase: Hosting/Cloud Functions/Firestore/Auth Why: Everything is automagical HTTPS static website hosting for the create-react-app (This is what first got me started) Then came Storage,Firestore,Cloud Functions, and Auth. Wish it had an automagical SQL product. Low Entry Cost Cloud Provider: Google Cloud Why: Had no experience with any cloud provider. I found the pricing/product offerings really easy to digest and interpret when compared to AWS. Email Sender: Sendgrid Why: Good starting free tier. Decent Docs. Easy to setup. Backend Compute: Google Compute Engine +Docker+Python-based API app Why: I can do local dev easily with Docker, push the image to Google Container Registry, then pull the image to the VM. It's easier to do than learning to setup a CI/CD piped GKE cluster Eventually I want to pay the "tax" go to a GKE CI/CD Kelsy Hightower setup,so I can git push/PR/merge a change, and it's in production. I don't do enough changes to the backend right now to justify a CI/CD piped GKE setup. Other: Email Client: Gsuite Why: Custom Domain Name I'm already familiar with Gmail Project Management: Trello Why: Integrates with Bitbucket Multi Device Support (Phone,Tablet,Desktop) Easy to mind map and organize features What I value: Good Docs Free tier for solo devs/low use, and progressive options for paid plans (Gives me breathing room on cash while I figure things out) Lots of questions/answers on Stack Overflow or in-depth Medium articles.
milankragujevic 8y ago
I'm not sure why people connect success with the language something is written in..?
- hnarayanan 8y ago
  Because that’s the only only thing they have control over. It’s at least possible to imitate someone’s stack or basic idea.
- yawaramin 8y ago
  This post doesn't seem to be about success, so much as trying to launch quickly.
riantogo 8y ago
It’s not cool anymore but I use PHP and MySQL with a $5/mo inmotionhosting account. This is after I decided to not take on the overhead of native with multiple code base and App Store deployments. Good ol’ webapp it is. However every single day I do wish there was a solution for my webapp to get access to contacts on the phone and of course notifications. It would have been a game changer given the nature of the product. Currently it is a world of compromises for hobby developers (shameless plug: http://ping3.com http://ping3.com)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
  I suspect thats actually possible if you use Turbolinks and made an app using their Android and iOS wrappers.
- andrewmackrodt 8y ago
  I use the lamp stack too, hosting on scaleway nowadays; aws is great but for my own non critical hobbiest projects scaleway is hard to beat. Having said that, cpanel is great on shared hosting with the ability to specify your PHP version and modules. As a language PHP can be a mess but the ecosystem is fantastic; the release of PSRs, composer and 7.x have been great.
nickjj 8y ago
I'm working on a new project as a solo developer. I'm writing it in Elixir and Phoenix (Elixir's goto web framework) with PostgreSQL to back my data. For the front end, I'm using good old fashioned server side rendered templates and Turbolinks with sprinkles of Javascript where needed. Despite having worked with Flask and Rails for the last 6-7 years I'm going for Elixir this time around because there are aspects of the app that lend itself well to what Phoenix has to offer and I'm using this as an opportunity to grow as a developer. Every time I learn a new language / framework I find myself leveling up in other technologies I know. So far I'm super excited with the way things are turning out. I'm still pretty early on in the project but I've gotten a decent amount of functionality implemented already. I'm really surprised Elixir isn't more popular. The language author and the supporting community is awesome, and I've been the happiest I've ever been working with this tech stack. Of course I'm still drinking the "omg this is new and awesome" kool-aid, but even without really knowing everything too well, I'm able to accomplish real world tasks and that's all I care about in the end.
- brandonmenc 8y ago
  I'm using exactly this stack for my current personal project - Elixir/Phoenix and Turbolinks. Sprinkling in either Elm or Vue for the one or two complicated widgets I'm going to need, but I haven't committed to either one yet.
  - mercer 8y ago
    I've settled on Elixir/Phoenix for the backend. On the front-end I might still experiment, but I think I'll settle for at least a decent chunk of time on this: 1. React + Styled Components (so html/css/js is finally no longer decoupled in a way that just makes no sense) 2. Page.js or something similar for routing, because I've been bitten too often by react-router and like, and the idea that routing is it's own thing makes sense to me. 3. Baobab.js or something similar for state management: basically, A. a single state object with B. a kind of cemtralized action-flow to change this state, and C. listeners of sorts within various components that trigger a re-render (cursors in the case of Baobab). I could go full-on redux, but it doesn't seem, necessary and I kind of relish running into the situation where, as my apps grow, it turns out to be immediately obvious why Redux does what it does. I'd be very curious to get some feedback on my choices, and/or alternative suggestions. In particular regarding 3. EDIT: to be clear, this is for full-on SPA's with no kind of crawling/SEO needs.
itbeho 8y ago
Elixir, Phoenix and Postgres. I like a lot about Elixir and find it's a great solution for many of the soft-realtime apps that I've been building lately. Standing up a CRUD app in Phoenix is dead simple as well.
mindcrime 8y ago
Speaking for myself: mainly Groovy and Grails, with a little Java mixed in. Postgresql when I need a relational DB. Bootstrap for basic CSS, and jQuery to add AJAXy bits. I have not yet adopted a JS framework like React or Vue, although I've been looking at giving Vue a shot. I use Ansible for automation, Git for version control, Eclipse as an IDE. Deploy to CentOS linux mostly. Just starting to go down the path of adopting Docker and (probably) Kubernetes. Cloud infrastructure is either Linode or AWS. All of that said, I'm a big believer in "use the right tool for the job" so if something comes up that requires C++, I'll use C++. If something needs Python, then Python it will be. If Prolog is right for something, I'll use Prolog. Or COBOL, or Erlang, or Ruby, or CL, or Perl, or SNOBOL, etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum...
ta1234567890 8y ago
Anyone knows of similar kits/packages to Laravel (PHP) and RailsKits (RoR)? Something that will let you focus on creating the part that's unique to your project rather than having to build everything (or a lot) from scratch? (Rails/Django/etc are not enough).
- i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
  currently using bullettrain.co fairly happily. It's geared towards B2B SaaS.
- greenhatman 8y ago
  Use Laravel Passport for OAuth. Use the Vue Cli to create your SPA. Then just write a class in the Vue app to store the bearer token and send it through on each request. I'm on mobile so going into detail is difficult. If it would be useful I'll write a guide for you.
robotkdick 8y ago
Not that I'm counting, but there are 20 mentions of React, 13 mentions of Vue, 10 mentions of Python, 9 mentions of Go, 8 mentions of rails. The OP had a couple mentions of Wordpress. AND Zero mentions of Meteor, lol! I think I'm the only indie developer using Meteor and Blaze, but I have to say they make my life WAY better. Granted, it took some time to figure out exactly how to optimize the stack to make it scale correctly, but NOW Meteor is the only solution I've heard of that does this: Meteor now automatically builds two sets of client-side assets, one tailored to the capabilities of modern browsers, and the other designed to work equally well in all supported browsers, so that legacy browsers can continue working exactly as they did before. This “legacy” bundle is equivalent to what Meteor 1.5 and 1.6 delivered to every browser, so the crucial difference in Meteor 1.7 is simply that modern browsers will begin receiving code that is much closer to what you originally wrote. The apps I build now run like native apps in a modern browser. Laser fast. It's beautiful, like the first time using broadband. After everyone and their mother proclaimed Meteor to be dead, they rose from the grave and locked in like Godzilla. I don't begrudge anyone their choices, but if you haven't taken a look at Meteor lately, having used Wordpress, Rails, Ember, React, and vanilla JS with node in the past, I'm very grateful Meteor's development team is STILL knocking it out of the park.
- terenceng2010 8y ago
  Haven't used meteor for a while, how does it solve the scaling issue for large amount of pub/sub?
  - robotkdick 8y ago
    Scaling requires attention, but not more or less than any other stack. Zeit’s now enables on demand horizontal scaling and they’re relatively inexpensive. Meteor, for whatever reason, got a bad reputation for scaling, but Josh Owens wrote up a guide in 2014: http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ I’ve never experienced any website that responds faster than one built with meteor post 1.7 in an updated browser. Lightning fast Apollo can also be used with graphQL, but I’m happy with the results using mongo and DDP out of the box with one simple command meteor create Deploying to now is also a one liner thanks to meteor now
hokumguru 8y ago
Surprised no ones talking GraphQL with as much coverage as it gets on this site. I’m running my newest solo project on Prisma with GraphQL Yoga as the backend and React + Apollo as the front end. It’s really quite something and allows for extremely quick development.
openIce 8y ago
C# with .Net core and MySQL. Probably one of the most stable stacks you can find. Everything just works and runs everywhere
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I'm sticking to standardized languages/tech with multiple implementations to keep control and deployment options: JavaScript, C, SQL, HTML and SGML, and Prolog, plus standardized APIs
jdblair 8y ago
Python for control software, C++ for LED drivers, OSC (Open Sound Control) for communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug https://github.com/jdblair/MegaPrayer-oscled https://github.com/jdblair/MegaPrayer-oscled
nathan_f77 8y ago
I built FormAPI [1] with Ruby on Rails. I used plain Rails views for most of the CRUD things, and used React/Redux to build the template editor [2], which is pretty complex. I've been extremely productive with Rails, and the performance has not been an issue at all. My plan is to rewrite the API and workers in Elixir when it will save me $2,000 per month on hosting costs. And even then, I would probably be making so much money that it wouldn't matter. I started on Heroku, but I had a lot of free AWS credits from Stripe Atlas that I wanted to use. So I moved to Convox [3] on AWS, and it has been absolutely awesome. I have a rock-solid cluster across 3 different availability zones, and I'm also running Postgres with high availability (RDS). I haven't had a single second of downtime since I migrated [4] (I up the status dashboard a few months ago, but moved to AWS earlier than that.) Convox supports auto-scaling and rolling deploys. It waits for the web process to be healthy, and if something crashes it rolls back the deploy without any downtime. I can also terminate any instance at will, and another one will pop up to replace it with zero downtime. After using it for the last ~6 months, I feel confident enough to start offering a 99.999% SLA. [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [2] https://formapi.io/templates/tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q/edit https://formapi.io/templates/tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q/edit [3] https://convox.com https://convox.com [4] http://status.formapi.io http://status.formapi.io
raarts 8y ago
My stack: Gitlab CI/CD, deploying using Ansible to Docker Swarm, running Keycloak for auth, RabbitMQ for messaging, Postgres, Elixir/Phoenix for the API server (GraphQL), Apollo + React Native for frontend and mobile apps. Why? For me it's best of breed vs simplicity. OpenID Connect is the most mature auth, rabbitmq very good messaging, elixir a lovely language, graphql the most programmer-friendly connection between frontend and backend, and react native allows 90% code sharing between web SPA and mobile apps. And if you combine all of these (I mean if you finally set it all up), it's a low number of lines of code environment.
IloveHN84 8y ago
I'm using c++17 with Conan and cmake, plus SQlite/Qt. I managed to run the deploy using terraform on AWS free tier and Azure msdn account
Andrex 8y ago
Firebase suits my needs almost perfectly for projects where I'd rather focus on the front-end and design than maintaining a back-end, since I'm only using it for very small apps and sites. Past that, I'm fond of Node, but that may be an unpopular thing to say on HN. :)
gorbypark 8y ago
On the backend my API is using node+koa and postgres+postgis. Front end is vue. Koa is amazing, and there's a postgis package for knex (a SQL query builder) that lets me do geospatial stuff right in node, which is a game changer. Backend is deployed in containers, Google container registry builds the images for free on every git push and custom bash scripts deploy on the digitalocean instance. Front end is deployed with Netlify, also on the free tier, and also amazing. It's incredible how cheap (and mostly free) it is to deploy side projects these days!
- ngrilly 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing your stack here! How do you deploy your backend containers without downtime? Do you host your Node app and PostgreSQL on the same machine? I understand your frontend is hosted on Netlify and your backend on DigitalOcean: are they accessible under the same hostname (using Netlify proxy for example), or do you use CORS requests?
  - gorbypark 8y ago
    I do have a slight downtime (1 second or so) when upgrading containers since the bash scripts just pulls the new image, stops/rm the container and start up the new one... Although my project is for an enterprise customer who works 7am-5:30pm so I just do it outside of those hours. Each end point is it's own instance too, which minimizes the likely hood of anyone knowing. It was all designed to run on kubernetes which would allow rolling updates with zero downtime, but I can't justify the cost of a cluster at the moment. The node app and postgres are on different instances. They could easily be on the same, though. Postgres is open to the world since GIS analysts need to be able to connect to it with QGIS. The API is also open to the world using CORS for the same reason (a custom GIS collection tool accesses the REST API).
    - ngrilly 8y ago
      Interesting! I think a 1 second downtime when deploying a new version of the backend is tolerable if the app is a single-page application, because the app can implement a retry logic client-side. This is possible only if the backend can be stopped and restarted really quickly. Otherwise, a rolling update or green-bue deployment is necessary. Another question: do you expose your Node service directly to the Internet, or is it behind a reverse proxy?
dopeboy 8y ago
React + Django hosted on Heroku. Why? Because I'm most the productive with it.
deforciant 8y ago
I use Go, Vue.js, Postgres, NATS, Redis, Keel, and deploy everything Kubernetes. So far I am super happy with the stack, runs cheaply and requires pretty much no maintenance. Just tag a release on GitHub, Google Cloud Builder builds the image, Keel updates deployments and in a few seconds I have updated production with zero downtime. While some people are happy with their copy/paste binaries/code to remote servers, I think a good pipeline to release and run your workloads makes working on side projects a lot more pleasure where you can focus on code and features. It also provides you with a valuable experience that can make you more money than the side project itself :)
insulanian 8y ago
F# on .NET Core with PostgreSQL, written with JetBrains Rider, running on Ubuntu on AWS.

230 points by ChanningAllen 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

C++/Qt for GUI, Go or Python for backend, Python for misc scripts/prototypes, C for uCs. They are all well trodden paths with plenty of good libraries available, and good tooling available. I have spent a bit of time playing with Zig most recently, it could finally replace C for me!

holografix 8y ago

Python, Django/WagtailCMS, React+Redux, Redis and RedisQ, Postgres, Kafka, Docker + Compose for local dev. Visual Studio Code. Tempted to learn a 2nd language well, thinking Go but curious about the experience of Kotlin + IntelliJ

tephra 8y ago

Web: typescript frontend and phoenix (Elixir) backend is My new setup. Apps: Flutter and if I need it switch to native. But flutter is really good for my simple needs!

lkrubner 8y ago

I’ve a small side project I’m working on. I am writing the backend in Clojure and then deploy with Jenkins using the Groovy DSL — it’s useful that everything runs on the JVM. The Jenkins code calls Terraform to set up the servers, drawing on optimized AMIs I set up with Packer. I avoid Docker for all the reasons I’ve written about elsewhere (you can Google if you’re interested). Packer does everything that people would otherwise use Docker for. For now the frontend is plain HTML and jQuery. I haven’t done the mobile app yet so no need for Angular/Cordova or React.

stevenhuang 8y ago
Link for others: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous-gamble-which-we-will-regret http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-is-a-dangerous... It was a great--thanks.

noncoml 8y ago

For the backend I start with Node, then get tired of the runtime errors and switch to Go. Go is cool but soon I get tired of writing “if err == nil” so I switch to Haskell. Haskell is nice but soon I get tired of not finding decent libraries for some not very popular things that I use, so I say fuck it and go to rails. Ruby is nice and Rails feels well thought out and solid, but then I can’t help be annoyed that it’s not fast, so fuck it, I switch to Rust. I get tired of lifetimes and wrapping everything in RefCells so I switch to Erlang. Erlang is cool and all, but no fucking meta programming. Sucks, let’s try Lisp... I am not making fast progress, I think the problem is my keyboard, I should try buying that Ducky one I have been eyeing for quite a while.

newen 8y ago
Check out Elixir. It's Erlang with metaprogramming.
- 83457 8y ago
  I thought it was Ruby with Erlang... or was it Erlang with Ruby.. bah
  - newen 8y ago
    Erlang with Ruby-like syntax plus macros..something like that. It compiles to the same VM as Erlang's and has almost all of the same semantics as Erlang.
nso95 8y ago
Just pick something and stick with it, every technology has its problems.
- noncoml 8y ago
  You are right! I should stick with Scala. It will also give me the opportunity to learn a new language! Play looks good, but maybe I should go with Scalatra instead? Should I be using Slick? It's quite different than any ORM I used so far, maybe I should bake my own Scala ORM. OK then, here we go. One more decision, REST or GraphQL? GraphQL seems to be the future. Let's go with that. Man, types are nice and Scala's type system is powerful, but sometimes I wish I had the flexibility of a dynamic language. It would make prototyping much faster. Fuck it, "git checkout -b node_v2"

briandear 8y ago

Swift Vapor + PostgreSQL and you're done.

zhobbs 8y ago

For my recent projects, I've used Go + DynamoDB for a GraphQL backend, and Next.JS with SSR on the frontend. Deploying both to lambda with Apex Up. Stripe for billing, SendGrid for transactional email.

11235813213455 8y ago
"Next.JS with SSR on the frontend" I call that backend, and node is pretty good for graphql too (graphql-js), full JS make a lot of sense (add flow/TS to get more type-strength)
dpeck 8y ago
Any tips on the go/dynamodb side of things? I’ve looked at it and experimented a little and it seems quite easy to get data into dynamodb and quite convoluted to get it out.
- zhobbs 8y ago
  I'm using https://github.com/guregu/dynamo https://github.com/guregu/dynamo for the data reading/writing. In my experience, the trick with Dynamo is the schema design. I haven't had problems with the libraries/queries as long as the schema made sense for how I'd be accessing the data.

duncan-donuts 8y ago

My side project is using Rails, React, Postgres, and deployed to heroku. There’s nothing flashy but I can prototype quickly and it’s easy for 2 people to manage.

troycarlson 8y ago
Same here.

neeleshs 8y ago

Django, Postgres RDS on elastic beanstalk, with some SNS use. Vue+vuex on the front end. Gitlab CI/CD for deployment Extremely fast dev/deployment turnaround time with Django and Beanstalk. Vue/vuex is simple enough for me to understand and build SPA

konschubert 8y ago
That's my stack as well. But sure you mean SNS, not SQS? Though I have been thinking if I should replace elastic beanstalk with Kubernetes, since it seems to become the non-proprietary standard for deploying containers?
- neeleshs 8y ago
  I do mean SNS. Though at some point, I may switch to SQS or rabbitmq. SNS is "good enough" for my use cases and I don't have to run a beanstalk worker (like for sqs). I chose beanstalk because of how dead simple it is. It is non-standard in a way, but was the fastest way to get the app out. Again, I know the app may outgrow it's needs at some point. At that point I'll invest time to move it out to the flavor of the day:).
aldoushuxley001 8y ago
what are you using for css? Bootstrap? Bulma? Or some other library?
- neeleshs 8y ago
  A 20$ admin theme from themeforest, based on bootstrap3. Nice enough that it does not warrant massive re-styling right now. If the app becomes bit of a success, we'll outsource this part to more competent people ( me and partner are both backend-ish people)
bash-j 8y ago
Is there a guide on the internet that would help me figure out how to use Vue with Django? I tried a couple last month but they were poorly structured or didn't explain enough about what they were doing, and since I'm not great at JavaScript I gave up..

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rikkipitt 8y ago

Thanks for the featuring my side project https://www.inviewapp.com https://www.inviewapp.com Channing!

passivepinetree 8y ago

Over and over again I keep hearing the advice to "build using what you know." How do I separate what might be a side project to learn a new stack from a side project that might eventually make money?

clintonb 8y ago
Prioritize. If your goal is to get something out quickly and make money, use what you know. If your goal is to learn a new stack, learn the new stack. If you learn enough to comfortably release to customers, do it; otherwise, either get comfortable or rebuild.
Mc_Big_G 8y ago
I had to make this decision recently and my conclusion was if your goal is to build something that makes money, do it with what you know. Why? Because you can spend 100% of your time building instead of 50/50 learning/building (or worse). Projects with the goal of being a business should iterate and fail fast. If you win the app lottery and actually build something people will pay for, they won't want to wait for you to learn while you build it out. Someone else will do it with some "old" tech like ruby on rails and take your customers and revenue. Spend your time working on the business, not the tech. Developers think code is important but the reality is that it almost doesn't matter. You can build something successful with the worst tech decisions imaginable. I know it's hard to accept but it's true. I've personally witnessed an absolute frankenstein's monster app, made of a mish-mash of what are now considered the worst technologies, get sold for $30+ million and the founders retired to the Caribbean where the build a mansion and an upscale restaurant just for fun. I pity the people devs who have to inherit that, but the value wasn't in the tech and it almost never is.
- i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
  If you're spending 100% of your time building you're doing it wrong anyway. I feel like this is just missing so much conte xt. If you are working full time and can hack in your after hours to learn a new tech stack first and then start your project there might be an aggregate benefit over just starting the project right away using what you know. Context matters to a huge degree in these kinds of discussions. I feel like people just like to give blanket statement advice.

1996 8y ago

Python for the code, Postgres for the backend, Markdown for the frontend. Because I am too lazy to reinvent the wheel, and most of that is good enough. I would have much preferred to use Perl, R, dotnet, or just about anything else, but there was an already made library in Python that was good enough for 90% of my needs, and 100% with some elbow grease, so my lazyness made me learn Python instead! But wait- it gets dirtier than this! The code is done is Vi, with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups), and deployed to servers by manual SCP, with no automatic tests, no care about CD or automatization - yet: as I need more and more servers, I realize I have to spend time learning say ansible to provision them faster than a copy paste of bash (I have low standards but I won't do curl|bash, just... no) but I am delaying that as much as possible to concentate on implementation. The servers are on Debian VMs on Azure, just because they gave me free credits and do not perform as bad as AWS. When the free credits run out, I will move to DO. Then I will see what else I can use, and that will be the right time to care about ansible or whatever. It is as ugly as I can get away with to get my MVP out, using tech from 1996 lol.

paulddraper 8y ago
> with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups) I get the simplicity...but using git/hg/svn is just so easy. And you can easily rewind, diff, view changelogs for a file, etc.
- 1996 8y ago
  git takes typing more commands and bothering about the repo. rsync is run by cron.
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    If you want to do something dirty, you could schedule commits with cron.
- nlowell 8y ago
  I am not convinced that git is easy... I believe it's very powerful if you put the time into learning it, but anything with 50,000 separate guides on the internet must be somewhat unintuitive, right?

EliRivers 8y ago

C++, Qt and some OS API. I'm not in web apps.

copperx 8y ago
You're a very fortunate person. Count your blessings.
jcelerier 8y ago
Same stack ! happily hacking on a DAW for interactive art - https://ossia.io https://ossia.io

Aegis11 8y ago

Vue.js on the front end with MongoDB Stitch handling authentication and database storage. Deployed to AWS but started using Netlify and loving it.

im_cynical 8y ago

Currently been working on a web app for about 8 months. Python for the backend under the argument of "build using what you know". ReactJS for frontend development because Python for frontend work I find very antiquated. Architecture wise I'm hosted in AWS. Data is stored in MySQL and Redis. All self hosted because I'm to cheap to pay per request pricing and the overhead is very minor when done right when rolling my own

kimdotcom 8y ago
How much RAM do you allocate to Redis?
- im_cynical 8y ago
  My current indie web app is still in development so final numbers for prod are TBD. However I'm using it for * Storing time counters on user actions (timestamp of last time a user posted/edited X, meant to be a throttling mechanism against abuse) * Site content caching, around 20-50kb per page, each page being user generated content Sizes will obviously vary on traction so not sure about the final numbers. ---- My last 9-to-5 employer was a very well known and my largest caching tier in Redis there was 512GB in a cluster configuration. I'm using the same server configuration and sharding logic for the indie thing, just on a smaller scale
lilcorey10 8y ago
Excuse the ignorance, but how do you tie the React in with Python? Are they 2 standalone apps that communicate RESTfully?

sorrymate 8y ago

React/Redux frontend and .Net Core for backend API. The site takes advantage of Server-Side Rendering and Lazy Loading based on Routes/components. Authentication is built into the App with JWT and Authorize attributes on controllers.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Python and Cython, flask, gunicorn, various ML frameworks, Postgres for web services. Python with Cython because this allows extremely nice flexibility between concise, expressive code and low-level targeted performance optimization. Flask with gunicorn has scaled extremely well for us, but there are many good alternatives. Postgres because flexibility with customizations and data types in the database has been the most important thing for us.

jimmy1 8y ago

Go and, honestly, sqlite with backups written to S3. It's the absolute cheapest. I can run multiple apps on a t2.nano (t2.micro if I am feeling fancy). My apps cost something like $1.50 to run a month, and they can easily handle medium-sized traffic, plus Go is just so dead simple to deploy. scp a build binary, and boom I am done. Once the app grows and more collaboration/developers/requirements call for it, I will add more infrastructure.

copperx 8y ago
What Go libraries do you use?
- jimmy1 8y ago
  Mainly the stdlib, see above answer. Exceptions are logging auth, and sql driver.
  - andreygrehov 8y ago
    Which one do you use for auth? Any recommendations?
    - jimmy1 8y ago
      I really like goth https://github.com/markbates/goth https://github.com/markbates/goth
startupdiscuss 8y ago
Do you use a framework? Do you do everything server side with Go or do you have a JS library on the front-end?
- jimmy1 8y ago
  net/http and REST api all the way down, I for the most part try to stick to the stdlib as much as possible. The few exceptions are logging (I like zerolog) the sql driver, and auth. I do keep the front/backend separation because doing site hosting in S3 with a cloudfront cache is pennies on the dollar (.63 cents a month) and I tend to lean towards using vue.js more these days. I have been known to just serve the html statically directly from go as well, and use go templates in the past, and use minimal jquery where it's needed (I still like jquery :-/, not everything needs to be full-blown SPA-mode)

RandomBK 8y ago

I use multiplatform Kotlin to compile shared business logic to JVM and Javascript. The frontend then uses Typescript+React/Redux while the backend is a Kotlin Spring app with Postgres.

FragenAntworten 8y ago
How are you handling authentication? OAuth 2 with Spring Security, or something else?
- leonroy 8y ago
  Not the OP but I started with cookie based auth and Spring Security and then moved to OAuth 2 - it’s extremely painless to setup (100 lines of code at most) but it did take a while to understand it all. The Baeldung Spring Security course helped a lot. If in a hurry though you can always use an external service like Auth0. I had that setup in an afternoon whereas understanding OAuth 2 and Spring Security took a week.
  - FragenAntworten 8y ago
    Thanks! I'll check that course out.

munchbunny 8y ago

For getting web apps up fast, React, Firebase, Git, and Heroku. It's a well trodden path so the tooling is simple and the components are reliable. For my VR stuff... Unity is really the only choice that's fast to get off the ground, so Unity it is. For hacking together backend heavy stuff, Python. Flask if I need to expose an API endpoint. Postgres if I need a real database, sqlite if I don't. Deployed to my evergreen playpen virtual instance via Docker containers because it's, once again, a well trodden, simple, and undramatic path.

foota 8y ago
I'm curious, I've started doing development in unity but I find myself unaware of good patterns to use, any pointers to advice on unity design patterns?
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Unity is pretty squarely in the space of event based programming, so whatever design patterns apply there are generally useful. Because of stuff like animations making timelines unpredictable, you should embrace the event based approach as much as possible. Other than that, try your best to decouple game state from the actual objects that are flying around. You will never do it 100%, but the more egregious Unity code I've seen all shares the trait that they just jammed variables into scripts for objects without really thinking about how they'd tie together a distributed network of objects that have no easy way of addressing each other. The answer is that you don't: you still need a central game state.
jimmy1 8y ago
Do you use firebase auth? It looks really good. I just had a heck of a time implementing user management and a couple oauth2 flows and it looks like it could have saved me a bit of time. My only concern is their plans are a little weird, it just jumps from free tier to jumbo size, wish there was something a little in between for less money.
- munchbunny 8y ago

meesterdude 8y ago

Wow, lots of Vue mentioned! I was expecting mostly react, but surprised to see there was actually some pushback against it. > I've heard React described as "10 times as much work for a 20% better user experience", and I think that's about right (maybe not 10x, but probably 2x) I thought this was a gem.

startupdiscuss 8y ago

I haven't done an official count (comments plus the site) but a very strong showing for full stack Rails or Django, and when people do stick in a front end it is usually React or Vue.

motohagiography 8y ago

Flask (hosted by pythonanywhere) and Neo4j from Graphene. Chose both because I wanted consistency between the abstraction of my business logic, and the spec of my implementation. I get some chippy guff about using graphs, but by taking the time to define my business logic as a grammar, expressing that grammar as a graph, then implementing it directly into the model, I get a lot of "aha," moments from potential customers. Graphs can be analogous to functional languages in that if you are using them, there is a higher likelyhood you've reasoned something through before implementing it.

83457 8y ago
Can you provide more info about your graph approach? Thanks!
- motohagiography 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)

HugoDaniel 8y ago

For https://gridgenerator.com https://gridgenerator.com I am using: - Tachyons CSS - InfernoJS - Typescript - Node.js (with express and postgraphile) - PostgreSQL - Nginx - DragonflyBSD

wildrhythms 8y ago
Are you using Typescript for frontend or backend (or both)?
- HugoDaniel 8y ago
  Mostly front-end: https://github.com/HugoDaniel/gridgenerator https://github.com/HugoDaniel/gridgenerator But the video producer/converter is also in TS (in that same repo). It produces your making-of videos like these: https://gridgenerator.com/static/37.mp4 https://gridgenerator.com/static/37.mp4

Klonoar 8y ago

I actually wound up building most of my current project in Rust, on top of actix-web. Partly because I'm apparently a masochist, but also because... I mean c'mon, modern architecture is CRUD and job queues. Rust can do that fine if you don't get distracted by the bells and whistles. I ripped out and open sourced my user-module stuff for authentication handling, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/jelly https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/jelly

leon_sbt 8y ago

My software dev path: Didn't know anything serious about web dev/software systems 12 months ago. So if my stack seems shiny, I just picked what many people on Medium/Hacker News were talking/raving about. Front-end: React SPA (Via Create React App),Redux, React-Bootstrap Why: I had no prior framework experience, single command setup, and plenty questions on Stack Overflow and Medium articles to learn with. Going the plain Javascript route with no frame work,seemed like I would be on a slippery slope for spaghetti code down the line. React's one-way data flow and component architecture made things incredibly easy to mentally digest. I found React's documentation VERY well organized and explained, and Vue's documentation was intimidating when compared to React. Version Control: BitBucket Git Why: Free private tier for solo use and enjoyed previous experience with Atlassian products CI/CD: BitBucket Pipelines Why: Already using Bitbucket, this just worked seamlessly with it. Only $10 for 1000 more build minutes. Firebase: Hosting/Cloud Functions/Firestore/Auth Why: Everything is automagical HTTPS static website hosting for the create-react-app (This is what first got me started) Then came Storage,Firestore,Cloud Functions, and Auth. Wish it had an automagical SQL product. Low Entry Cost Cloud Provider: Google Cloud Why: Had no experience with any cloud provider. I found the pricing/product offerings really easy to digest and interpret when compared to AWS. Email Sender: Sendgrid Why: Good starting free tier. Decent Docs. Easy to setup. Backend Compute: Google Compute Engine +Docker+Python-based API app Why: I can do local dev easily with Docker, push the image to Google Container Registry, then pull the image to the VM. It's easier to do than learning to setup a CI/CD piped GKE cluster Eventually I want to pay the "tax" go to a GKE CI/CD Kelsy Hightower setup,so I can git push/PR/merge a change, and it's in production. I don't do enough changes to the backend right now to justify a CI/CD piped GKE setup. Other: Email Client: Gsuite Why: Custom Domain Name I'm already familiar with Gmail Project Management: Trello Why: Integrates with Bitbucket Multi Device Support (Phone,Tablet,Desktop) Easy to mind map and organize features What I value: Good Docs Free tier for solo devs/low use, and progressive options for paid plans (Gives me breathing room on cash while I figure things out) Lots of questions/answers on Stack Overflow or in-depth Medium articles.

milankragujevic 8y ago

I'm not sure why people connect success with the language something is written in..?

hnarayanan 8y ago
Because that’s the only only thing they have control over. It’s at least possible to imitate someone’s stack or basic idea.
yawaramin 8y ago
This post doesn't seem to be about success, so much as trying to launch quickly.

riantogo 8y ago

It’s not cool anymore but I use PHP and MySQL with a $5/mo inmotionhosting account. This is after I decided to not take on the overhead of native with multiple code base and App Store deployments. Good ol’ webapp it is. However every single day I do wish there was a solution for my webapp to get access to contacts on the phone and of course notifications. It would have been a game changer given the nature of the product. Currently it is a world of compromises for hobby developers (shameless plug: http://ping3.com http://ping3.com)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
I suspect thats actually possible if you use Turbolinks and made an app using their Android and iOS wrappers.
andrewmackrodt 8y ago
I use the lamp stack too, hosting on scaleway nowadays; aws is great but for my own non critical hobbiest projects scaleway is hard to beat. Having said that, cpanel is great on shared hosting with the ability to specify your PHP version and modules. As a language PHP can be a mess but the ecosystem is fantastic; the release of PSRs, composer and 7.x have been great.

nickjj 8y ago

I'm working on a new project as a solo developer. I'm writing it in Elixir and Phoenix (Elixir's goto web framework) with PostgreSQL to back my data. For the front end, I'm using good old fashioned server side rendered templates and Turbolinks with sprinkles of Javascript where needed. Despite having worked with Flask and Rails for the last 6-7 years I'm going for Elixir this time around because there are aspects of the app that lend itself well to what Phoenix has to offer and I'm using this as an opportunity to grow as a developer. Every time I learn a new language / framework I find myself leveling up in other technologies I know. So far I'm super excited with the way things are turning out. I'm still pretty early on in the project but I've gotten a decent amount of functionality implemented already. I'm really surprised Elixir isn't more popular. The language author and the supporting community is awesome, and I've been the happiest I've ever been working with this tech stack. Of course I'm still drinking the "omg this is new and awesome" kool-aid, but even without really knowing everything too well, I'm able to accomplish real world tasks and that's all I care about in the end.

brandonmenc 8y ago
I'm using exactly this stack for my current personal project - Elixir/Phoenix and Turbolinks. Sprinkling in either Elm or Vue for the one or two complicated widgets I'm going to need, but I haven't committed to either one yet.
- mercer 8y ago
  I've settled on Elixir/Phoenix for the backend. On the front-end I might still experiment, but I think I'll settle for at least a decent chunk of time on this: 1. React + Styled Components (so html/css/js is finally no longer decoupled in a way that just makes no sense) 2. Page.js or something similar for routing, because I've been bitten too often by react-router and like, and the idea that routing is it's own thing makes sense to me. 3. Baobab.js or something similar for state management: basically, A. a single state object with B. a kind of cemtralized action-flow to change this state, and C. listeners of sorts within various components that trigger a re-render (cursors in the case of Baobab). I could go full-on redux, but it doesn't seem, necessary and I kind of relish running into the situation where, as my apps grow, it turns out to be immediately obvious why Redux does what it does. I'd be very curious to get some feedback on my choices, and/or alternative suggestions. In particular regarding 3. EDIT: to be clear, this is for full-on SPA's with no kind of crawling/SEO needs.

itbeho 8y ago

Elixir, Phoenix and Postgres. I like a lot about Elixir and find it's a great solution for many of the soft-realtime apps that I've been building lately. Standing up a CRUD app in Phoenix is dead simple as well.

mindcrime 8y ago

Speaking for myself: mainly Groovy and Grails, with a little Java mixed in. Postgresql when I need a relational DB. Bootstrap for basic CSS, and jQuery to add AJAXy bits. I have not yet adopted a JS framework like React or Vue, although I've been looking at giving Vue a shot. I use Ansible for automation, Git for version control, Eclipse as an IDE. Deploy to CentOS linux mostly. Just starting to go down the path of adopting Docker and (probably) Kubernetes. Cloud infrastructure is either Linode or AWS. All of that said, I'm a big believer in "use the right tool for the job" so if something comes up that requires C++, I'll use C++. If something needs Python, then Python it will be. If Prolog is right for something, I'll use Prolog. Or COBOL, or Erlang, or Ruby, or CL, or Perl, or SNOBOL, etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum...

ta1234567890 8y ago

Anyone knows of similar kits/packages to Laravel (PHP) and RailsKits (RoR)? Something that will let you focus on creating the part that's unique to your project rather than having to build everything (or a lot) from scratch? (Rails/Django/etc are not enough).

i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
currently using bullettrain.co fairly happily. It's geared towards B2B SaaS.
greenhatman 8y ago
Use Laravel Passport for OAuth. Use the Vue Cli to create your SPA. Then just write a class in the Vue app to store the bearer token and send it through on each request. I'm on mobile so going into detail is difficult. If it would be useful I'll write a guide for you.

robotkdick 8y ago

Not that I'm counting, but there are 20 mentions of React, 13 mentions of Vue, 10 mentions of Python, 9 mentions of Go, 8 mentions of rails. The OP had a couple mentions of Wordpress. AND Zero mentions of Meteor, lol! I think I'm the only indie developer using Meteor and Blaze, but I have to say they make my life WAY better. Granted, it took some time to figure out exactly how to optimize the stack to make it scale correctly, but NOW Meteor is the only solution I've heard of that does this: Meteor now automatically builds two sets of client-side assets, one tailored to the capabilities of modern browsers, and the other designed to work equally well in all supported browsers, so that legacy browsers can continue working exactly as they did before. This “legacy” bundle is equivalent to what Meteor 1.5 and 1.6 delivered to every browser, so the crucial difference in Meteor 1.7 is simply that modern browsers will begin receiving code that is much closer to what you originally wrote. The apps I build now run like native apps in a modern browser. Laser fast. It's beautiful, like the first time using broadband. After everyone and their mother proclaimed Meteor to be dead, they rose from the grave and locked in like Godzilla. I don't begrudge anyone their choices, but if you haven't taken a look at Meteor lately, having used Wordpress, Rails, Ember, React, and vanilla JS with node in the past, I'm very grateful Meteor's development team is STILL knocking it out of the park.

terenceng2010 8y ago
Haven't used meteor for a while, how does it solve the scaling issue for large amount of pub/sub?
- robotkdick 8y ago
  Scaling requires attention, but not more or less than any other stack. Zeit’s now enables on demand horizontal scaling and they’re relatively inexpensive. Meteor, for whatever reason, got a bad reputation for scaling, but Josh Owens wrote up a guide in 2014: http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ http://joshowens.me/how-to-scale-a-meteor-js-app/ I’ve never experienced any website that responds faster than one built with meteor post 1.7 in an updated browser. Lightning fast Apollo can also be used with graphQL, but I’m happy with the results using mongo and DDP out of the box with one simple command meteor create Deploying to now is also a one liner thanks to meteor now

hokumguru 8y ago

Surprised no ones talking GraphQL with as much coverage as it gets on this site. I’m running my newest solo project on Prisma with GraphQL Yoga as the backend and React + Apollo as the front end. It’s really quite something and allows for extremely quick development.

openIce 8y ago

C# with .Net core and MySQL. Probably one of the most stable stacks you can find. Everything just works and runs everywhere

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I'm sticking to standardized languages/tech with multiple implementations to keep control and deployment options: JavaScript, C, SQL, HTML and SGML, and Prolog, plus standardized APIs

jdblair 8y ago

Python for control software, C++ for LED drivers, OSC (Open Sound Control) for communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG4xvTjzRwo&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVFdqyaKug https://github.com/jdblair/MegaPrayer-oscled https://github.com/jdblair/MegaPrayer-oscled

nathan_f77 8y ago

I built FormAPI [1] with Ruby on Rails. I used plain Rails views for most of the CRUD things, and used React/Redux to build the template editor [2], which is pretty complex. I've been extremely productive with Rails, and the performance has not been an issue at all. My plan is to rewrite the API and workers in Elixir when it will save me $2,000 per month on hosting costs. And even then, I would probably be making so much money that it wouldn't matter. I started on Heroku, but I had a lot of free AWS credits from Stripe Atlas that I wanted to use. So I moved to Convox [3] on AWS, and it has been absolutely awesome. I have a rock-solid cluster across 3 different availability zones, and I'm also running Postgres with high availability (RDS). I haven't had a single second of downtime since I migrated [4] (I up the status dashboard a few months ago, but moved to AWS earlier than that.) Convox supports auto-scaling and rolling deploys. It waits for the web process to be healthy, and if something crashes it rolls back the deploy without any downtime. I can also terminate any instance at will, and another one will pop up to replace it with zero downtime. After using it for the last ~6 months, I feel confident enough to start offering a 99.999% SLA. [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [2] https://formapi.io/templates/tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q/edit https://formapi.io/templates/tpl_DEMO42TmQjTgsQ7q/edit [3] https://convox.com https://convox.com [4] http://status.formapi.io http://status.formapi.io

raarts 8y ago

My stack: Gitlab CI/CD, deploying using Ansible to Docker Swarm, running Keycloak for auth, RabbitMQ for messaging, Postgres, Elixir/Phoenix for the API server (GraphQL), Apollo + React Native for frontend and mobile apps. Why? For me it's best of breed vs simplicity. OpenID Connect is the most mature auth, rabbitmq very good messaging, elixir a lovely language, graphql the most programmer-friendly connection between frontend and backend, and react native allows 90% code sharing between web SPA and mobile apps. And if you combine all of these (I mean if you finally set it all up), it's a low number of lines of code environment.

IloveHN84 8y ago

I'm using c++17 with Conan and cmake, plus SQlite/Qt. I managed to run the deploy using terraform on AWS free tier and Azure msdn account

Andrex 8y ago

Firebase suits my needs almost perfectly for projects where I'd rather focus on the front-end and design than maintaining a back-end, since I'm only using it for very small apps and sites. Past that, I'm fond of Node, but that may be an unpopular thing to say on HN. :)

gorbypark 8y ago

On the backend my API is using node+koa and postgres+postgis. Front end is vue. Koa is amazing, and there's a postgis package for knex (a SQL query builder) that lets me do geospatial stuff right in node, which is a game changer. Backend is deployed in containers, Google container registry builds the images for free on every git push and custom bash scripts deploy on the digitalocean instance. Front end is deployed with Netlify, also on the free tier, and also amazing. It's incredible how cheap (and mostly free) it is to deploy side projects these days!

ngrilly 8y ago
Thanks for sharing your stack here! How do you deploy your backend containers without downtime? Do you host your Node app and PostgreSQL on the same machine? I understand your frontend is hosted on Netlify and your backend on DigitalOcean: are they accessible under the same hostname (using Netlify proxy for example), or do you use CORS requests?
- gorbypark 8y ago
  I do have a slight downtime (1 second or so) when upgrading containers since the bash scripts just pulls the new image, stops/rm the container and start up the new one... Although my project is for an enterprise customer who works 7am-5:30pm so I just do it outside of those hours. Each end point is it's own instance too, which minimizes the likely hood of anyone knowing. It was all designed to run on kubernetes which would allow rolling updates with zero downtime, but I can't justify the cost of a cluster at the moment. The node app and postgres are on different instances. They could easily be on the same, though. Postgres is open to the world since GIS analysts need to be able to connect to it with QGIS. The API is also open to the world using CORS for the same reason (a custom GIS collection tool accesses the REST API).
  - ngrilly 8y ago
    Interesting! I think a 1 second downtime when deploying a new version of the backend is tolerable if the app is a single-page application, because the app can implement a retry logic client-side. This is possible only if the backend can be stopped and restarted really quickly. Otherwise, a rolling update or green-bue deployment is necessary. Another question: do you expose your Node service directly to the Internet, or is it behind a reverse proxy?

dopeboy 8y ago

React + Django hosted on Heroku. Why? Because I'm most the productive with it.

deforciant 8y ago

I use Go, Vue.js, Postgres, NATS, Redis, Keel, and deploy everything Kubernetes. So far I am super happy with the stack, runs cheaply and requires pretty much no maintenance. Just tag a release on GitHub, Google Cloud Builder builds the image, Keel updates deployments and in a few seconds I have updated production with zero downtime. While some people are happy with their copy/paste binaries/code to remote servers, I think a good pipeline to release and run your workloads makes working on side projects a lot more pleasure where you can focus on code and features. It also provides you with a valuable experience that can make you more money than the side project itself :)

insulanian 8y ago

F# on .NET Core with PostgreSQL, written with JetBrains Rider, running on Ubuntu on AWS.