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Idk,I actually don't understand the obsession of many with Tech Stack or predicting the doom of a language. Because Facebook uses PHP for their service, Would y

by amrrs 6y ago

Idk,I actually don't understand the obsession of many with Tech Stack or predicting the doom of a language. Because Facebook uses PHP for their service, Would you still use PHP? A lot of people despise PHP. But there's PH maker Mubs, most of his indie products LAMP stack. The main lesson I get from any of these is that pick the one that you're comfortable with and deliver the project than looking for what's the best tool in 2020

ChefboyOG 6y ago
Yeah, selecting a stack IMO has more to do with scoping your goals. For example, if you are an indie dev who will be developing a project solo, pick whatever you're best at, because all that matters is the product. If you're an open source project, that's a different story. If you're looking to hire engineers, also a different game. And if you're the creator of Ruby on Rails and have created a giant personal brand around being contrarian and ignoring the new-hotness in web dev, then your choice is made for you.
- pell 6y ago
  I wouldn't call DHH contrarian for sticking with a mature framework.
  - dmlittle 6y ago
    Not only is it mature, but it's his framework. Sure he's not the only maintainer but he's the original author. It makes sense to use your own tools; specially if they're successful.
- nscalf 6y ago
  I'd also say that a lot of people expecting to eventually hire on developers don't have to pick the tech stack that will scale to a 30 developer team. I've known a lot of very successful companies where the core tech was rebuilt/replaced as the team demands grow. And a lot of them probably wouldn't have gotten there that quickly if they make decisions around a 30 person team when they were 2 people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nscalf 6y ago
I agree with you, for >95% of projects most of the tools available to you have reasonable upside and downside. If you were equally skilled in all options, it more or less doesn't matter what you pick. There are definitely problems, and entire fields (like hardware) where you don't have much of a choice due to the performance demands. But if you're building a small company or website, for the most part the dogmatism around the tools you use are nonsense, and just get in the way of getting stuff done.
throwaway894345 6y ago
Yeah, tech stacks are important, but which one is right is so dependent on the specifics of a given project, which is what most of these tech-stack-hype conversations ignore. My small company pays out the ears in so many different ways to run our Python service, but we picked it because certain big companies can use Python at much larger scale than ours. Of course, those companies are mostly just doing CRUD operations to a database and often errors don't matter nearly as much because it's social media or whatever, and also they aren't as cost-sensitive as our business. Instead, we're fighting tooth and nail to keep our requests below a 60s HTTP timeout threshold when they could probably be on the order of a few seconds without optimization if we used a more performant application language like Java, C#, or Go (although the first two might involve some tradeoff on developer productivity; Go would probably improve developer productivity and it would certainly be a significant improvement to the tooling/deployment/etc story).
- lukevp 6y ago
  If you’re interested in talking through this and are considering C#, you’re welcome to email me and bounce around some ideas. I have a lot of experience in both Python and C# and may be able to help!
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    We’re sadly not considering a change to our application language. Thanks though. :)
- gav 6y ago
  > tech stacks are important I'd argue that tech stacks are unimportant 99% of the time. It really doesn't matter if you use Java or PHP or Python or Node. Failures that I have seen due to the choice of tech stack include: - Technologies that your team doesn't know well - Technologies where hiring is difficult (I've seen attempts to turn C# devs into F# devs and Java devs into Clojure devs and productivity suffered) - Choosing the flavor of the week, whether that's the hottest Javascript framework or newest NoSQL database - Over-architecting thinking you were Google-scale with the added complexity hurting velocity (it doesn't matter if you can scale to millions of users if you can't get there) Generally boring tech stacks work. By the time your Ruby/MySQL monolith has performance issues, hopefully you're successful enough that you can scale out the worst performing parts in some other language/datastore combination. You'll be in a better position to fix performance problems are when you have them rather then when you are trying to predict them up front.
alexbanks 6y ago
Selecting a tech stack is 75% about your developers skillsets and 25% about how easy it is to hire for that skillset, IMO. Anything else is just hype. HEY picked their stack because their founder is literally the creator of Rails, so obviously they're going to use Rails and its related tie-ins (MySQL, Redis). This isn't really interesting as DHH has been a proponent of "Rails good everything else bad" for quite some time, and will probably only continue to double down on that stance.
smt88 6y ago
> I actually don't understand the obsession of many with Tech Stack or predicting the doom of a language Really? You don't understand why people have strong opinions about the tools they use for work every single day? Most programmers don't get to choose the stack they work on. Even if they do, you're going to run into pain points and wonder, "Did I pick the right thing? Would I be equally frustrated if we had gone a different direction? What would be the most enjoyable stack to choose next time?" People do (and should) care a lot about their tools. Facebook cares so much that they invented an entirely new programming language called Hack to replace PHP, and they also invented Flow and Reason as JavaScript alternatives. Even for small companies, tools matter. If you spend all your time rebuilding libraries, debugging at runtime, or waiting for devs to learn your stack, you're losing money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deltron3030 6y ago
Using just your bare hands to build a startup is cool.
- omarchowdhury 6y ago
  Don't forget the machine augmentation.

by amrrs 6y ago

ChefboyOG 6y ago

Yeah, selecting a stack IMO has more to do with scoping your goals. For example, if you are an indie dev who will be developing a project solo, pick whatever you're best at, because all that matters is the product. If you're an open source project, that's a different story. If you're looking to hire engineers, also a different game. And if you're the creator of Ruby on Rails and have created a giant personal brand around being contrarian and ignoring the new-hotness in web dev, then your choice is made for you.

pell 6y ago
I wouldn't call DHH contrarian for sticking with a mature framework.
- dmlittle 6y ago
  Not only is it mature, but it's his framework. Sure he's not the only maintainer but he's the original author. It makes sense to use your own tools; specially if they're successful.
nscalf 6y ago
I'd also say that a lot of people expecting to eventually hire on developers don't have to pick the tech stack that will scale to a 30 developer team. I've known a lot of very successful companies where the core tech was rebuilt/replaced as the team demands grow. And a lot of them probably wouldn't have gotten there that quickly if they make decisions around a 30 person team when they were 2 people.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nscalf 6y ago

I agree with you, for >95% of projects most of the tools available to you have reasonable upside and downside. If you were equally skilled in all options, it more or less doesn't matter what you pick. There are definitely problems, and entire fields (like hardware) where you don't have much of a choice due to the performance demands. But if you're building a small company or website, for the most part the dogmatism around the tools you use are nonsense, and just get in the way of getting stuff done.

throwaway894345 6y ago

Yeah, tech stacks are important, but which one is right is so dependent on the specifics of a given project, which is what most of these tech-stack-hype conversations ignore. My small company pays out the ears in so many different ways to run our Python service, but we picked it because certain big companies can use Python at much larger scale than ours. Of course, those companies are mostly just doing CRUD operations to a database and often errors don't matter nearly as much because it's social media or whatever, and also they aren't as cost-sensitive as our business. Instead, we're fighting tooth and nail to keep our requests below a 60s HTTP timeout threshold when they could probably be on the order of a few seconds without optimization if we used a more performant application language like Java, C#, or Go (although the first two might involve some tradeoff on developer productivity; Go would probably improve developer productivity and it would certainly be a significant improvement to the tooling/deployment/etc story).

lukevp 6y ago
If you’re interested in talking through this and are considering C#, you’re welcome to email me and bounce around some ideas. I have a lot of experience in both Python and C# and may be able to help!
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  We’re sadly not considering a change to our application language. Thanks though. :)
gav 6y ago
> tech stacks are important I'd argue that tech stacks are unimportant 99% of the time. It really doesn't matter if you use Java or PHP or Python or Node. Failures that I have seen due to the choice of tech stack include: - Technologies that your team doesn't know well - Technologies where hiring is difficult (I've seen attempts to turn C# devs into F# devs and Java devs into Clojure devs and productivity suffered) - Choosing the flavor of the week, whether that's the hottest Javascript framework or newest NoSQL database - Over-architecting thinking you were Google-scale with the added complexity hurting velocity (it doesn't matter if you can scale to millions of users if you can't get there) Generally boring tech stacks work. By the time your Ruby/MySQL monolith has performance issues, hopefully you're successful enough that you can scale out the worst performing parts in some other language/datastore combination. You'll be in a better position to fix performance problems are when you have them rather then when you are trying to predict them up front.

alexbanks 6y ago

Selecting a tech stack is 75% about your developers skillsets and 25% about how easy it is to hire for that skillset, IMO. Anything else is just hype. HEY picked their stack because their founder is literally the creator of Rails, so obviously they're going to use Rails and its related tie-ins (MySQL, Redis). This isn't really interesting as DHH has been a proponent of "Rails good everything else bad" for quite some time, and will probably only continue to double down on that stance.

smt88 6y ago

> I actually don't understand the obsession of many with Tech Stack or predicting the doom of a language Really? You don't understand why people have strong opinions about the tools they use for work every single day? Most programmers don't get to choose the stack they work on. Even if they do, you're going to run into pain points and wonder, "Did I pick the right thing? Would I be equally frustrated if we had gone a different direction? What would be the most enjoyable stack to choose next time?" People do (and should) care a lot about their tools. Facebook cares so much that they invented an entirely new programming language called Hack to replace PHP, and they also invented Flow and Reason as JavaScript alternatives. Even for small companies, tools matter. If you spend all your time rebuilding libraries, debugging at runtime, or waiting for devs to learn your stack, you're losing money.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deltron3030 6y ago

Using just your bare hands to build a startup is cool.

omarchowdhury 6y ago
Don't forget the machine augmentation.