12 ms·

Why must you laugh at my back end?

348 points by pud 15y ago

alnayyir 15y ago
It's less laughing and more "first world paternalistic concern for a third world nation trashing about".
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dclaysmith 15y ago
The synchronizing with Dropbox is pretty clever. Had never thought of that. Probably some latency issues--it wouldn't suit all cases but definitely would be a simple fix to a few problems I've had in the past.
- kaeluka 15y ago
  I use it for all of my dotfiles. A small script moves them to the ~/Dropbox/bckp/dotfiles and replaces them with a symbolic link. Also for my ~/scripts folder. It's wonderful to have access to those in a matter of minutes if you are starting with a new machine...
  - mdwrigh2 15y ago
    For an alternative method, I do a similar thing but put them all on Github and have a quick script to symlink them to the right place. Easy to set up a new machine in minutes, and I maintain history indefinitely. https://github.com/mdwrigh2/dotfiles https://github.com/mdwrigh2/dotfiles
- icebraining 15y ago
  Do you (the plural you) really trust Dropbox Inc. enough to give them access to all your application files on your servers? Personally I don't use Dropbox for anything minimally sensitive (basically, anything that I haven't downloaded from the web) without putting it on a Truecrypt container. Maybe I'm just paranoid, though.
  - Luyt 15y ago
    I'd use tarsnap.
acangiano 15y ago
In computing, there is an emphasis on the tools, rather than what you do with them. It's worth noting that it's not limited to computing either. Countless amateur photographers spend their time discussing hardware, rather than techniques and other aspects that would benefit their craft to a much greater extent. Personally, as much as I'm fascinated by the tools, I'm much more curious about what you do with them. So I'm always glad when I see someone succeed and create something useful with an odd stack of technologies. It reminds me to focus less on the tools and more on the creation process.
- commandar 15y ago
  >Countless amateur photographers spend their time discussing hardware, rather than techniques and other aspects that would benefit their craft to a much greater extent. You see the same thing among firearms enthusiasts. It's fairly common to find people that spend (tens of) thousands of dollars chasing the best gear, but won't spend $2-400 on training from a reputable instructor.
  - earl 15y ago
    And snowboarders. People spend probably minimum $1k for clothes, boots, board and bindings; plus $70+/day for a lift ticket; but won't spend $50 to go to a group class and actually learn how to do it. And they're dangerous to everyone around them because they can't dismount a goddamn lift without falling down and probably knocking down their neighbors.
    - knieveltech 15y ago
      And climbers. Nothing like wading through a gibbering horde of prana wearing gumbies topropting with their $350 shiny new 70 meter bicolor ropes first thing in the morning at the crag. And kayakers. I've lost count of the number of times I've had someone's shiny new boat (closely followed by an expanding slick of random gear) float past me on class III+ runs. And hikers. Ever see a day hiker doing a mile and a half loop trail wearing a $350 hydration pack, $150 trail shoes clad head to toe in North Face gear? And blacksmiths. Endless are the rants on why a $800 Beverly throatless shear is infinitely superior to an identical model from Harbor Freight that costs a mere $90. And car enthusiasts. Ever see a $90,000 sportscar dinking around in traffic on a Saturday afternoon? See a pattern forming? People (mistakenly or otherwise) attach prestige to the latest expensive gear, regardless of the activity in question.
kokon 15y ago
Why must you laugh? If it works, why not?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nhashem 15y ago
This is great. Seriously. I cut my teeth in the early 2000s writing the type of PHP code that would make your eyes bleed. Global variables everywhere. HTML/PHP/MySQL in the same file. Career-wise I ended up going down a backend/database developer path, so if I do anything with consumer-facing web applications, it's on my free time. I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done is writing similar code to what I wrote in 2003. It's not quite as bad, but I continually succumb to doubt. Shouldn't I be using a framework? Wouldn't Python or Ruby be a better language to use now? Is it 'cheating' if I just throw these form elements in an HTML table? Shouldn't I be using something more scalable for the backend than a default installation of MySQL 5.1? And yet, every time I try and address any of the above, it just gets frustrating to me. I have a limited of free time to work on this web application each week. So I want to spend that time actually DOING things with my web application, not just ramping up on learning some stuff so that I can maybe do some things a few weeks from now. This web application is getting a bit of traction with users. I always figured that I would eventually "code myself into a corner," and that making these suboptimal technology stack choices would result in me hitting some local maxima that would bite me in the ass and I'd have to basically rewrite everything. But after reading this blog post, I feel a lot better about my choices. If this guy can make his web application work with the technology stack he prefers, then so can I.
- wynand 15y ago
  I have respect for people that can deliver, regardless of what they use. The allure of cool tech is strong but tech doesn't make products: people do. I cannot see what is wrong with your using plain PHP if you can get the job done faster (as long as you avoid things that make exploits easy, such as raw mysql db functions). When the time for a framework comes, you'll know. Stop worrying about what others think and good luck!
  - JasPanesar 15y ago
    +1 to both of you!
    - 15y ago
rdouble 15y ago
What sites are running this hilarious back end?
- barlo 15y ago
  What makes this hilarious?
  - rdouble 15y ago
    the title of the post
- pud 15y ago
  Several of these: http://adhdinc.com http://adhdinc.com and http://pud.com http://pud.com
  - rdouble 15y ago
    Cool, thanks! How do you edit the Cold Fusion?
    - pud 15y ago
      Coda
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - xyzzyz 15y ago
    [i]Please[/i] tell me that these animated GIFs and background MIDI on pud.com are parts of the joke.
    - j_col 15y ago
      My guess is they are, considering the footer says "This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0 or above". It's a cool domain though, how many three letter .com domains out there?
hristov 15y ago
Is that the same pud that did fuckedconpany? It was a hilarious site where people made fun of over valued companies during the first boom. Unfotunately the site eventually became overrun by nazis (not kidding) and had to be shut down.
- pud 15y ago
  Indeed.
  - maukdaddy 15y ago
    Wow! Blast from the past! You might need to resurrect that site if the current bubble continues ;)
  - puredemo 15y ago
    Why did you take that down? I've wondered that for years..
bcrouse 15y ago
I don't get it. Would anyone argue that you couldn't launch successful sites this way? Tools are made to improve the process and enable new possibilities; that's why use good tools.
PedroCandeias 15y ago
I don't hang out with a lot of programmers and I guess this is the reason. This "laughing" the op alludes to. This endless discussion of what language or back end is the best. I find it impossible to talk about programming with people who would rather indoctrinate me on the benefits of their chosen language than talk about, say, data structures. It's like arguing about what colour is the best. It's pointless. So big ups to pud for his post and his peculiar stack. In its own way, it's a very cool and imaginative stack. And it works, which I think is the only thing that matters in the end.
- humbledrone 15y ago
  Talking about the differences between, say, assembly language and Ruby is very different than arguing about what color is the best. I guarantee that some projects will be successful if written in one of those languages, and not the other (webapp in assembly? bootloader in Ruby?). Also, in your view, how is talking about data structures any better than talking about languages? Wouldn't that just be "indoctrinating me on the benefits" of your chosen data structure? If the only thing that matters is that the program works, then why does it matter what kind of balanced binary tree is in use behind the scenes, any more than the language matters? Tools do matter. Maybe you're not interested in incremental improvements in your productivity as a programmer, but those who are will probably spend time talking about their tools (hopefully balanced by spending even more time actually using them).
  - scott_s 15y ago
    I think we was just trying to differentiate between advocating a particular technology versus discussing a fundamental idea. Using the examples that other people have given from hobbies and sports, it's like the inclination to discuss gear instead of the activity itself.
    - humbledrone 15y ago
      Discussing software tools as a programmer is nothing at all like discussing lenses on a camera. As far as I'm aware, there's no lens out there that can increase your productivity as a photographer by tenfold. Choosing Ruby over assembly language for a webapp could _easily_ increase your productivity by tenfold (probably more like a hundredfold). Obviously not every software tool discussion is as exaggerated as that, but even if you're arguing Django vs Rails, there really are significant differences that could affect your work in dramatic ways (e.g. one framework has a plugin that would take you a week to write, while the other doesn't).
reinhardt 15y ago
As long as Xeround sticks around and does what they say they can do, I’ll never have to worry about scaling my database Never heard of that database/company before so I clicked on the link out of curiosity and guess what, their server is down. Not very reassuring for an "infinitely scalable solution".
- pud 15y ago
  Well damn, you're right. Looks like they were Hacker News'd. Fortunately Xeround's database servers are still up, but this is a bit disconcerting.
  - revorad 15y ago
    I wanted to give them a try but if a scalable database company can't handle HN traffic, it makes me think twice.
    - endtime 15y ago
      They may be using something cheap for their homepage because they (understandably) don't expect to get hit hard there.
- jeromeparadis 15y ago
  Didn't knew about them either. Not too worried about the home page having hickups earlier as it isn't their database cloud. But, I'll definitely do some testing around this/these MySQL MySQL cloud service(s). Something I haven't looked at before and sounds too good to be true.
fatalerrorx3 15y ago
You need elastic load balancing for iPhone Apps, do they call your web servers that often? How many users are you dealing with currently? Wondering if my single server in my house will be enough to launch a new web service shortly..the server is currently a quad core dedicated Ubuntu LAMP Server with 2gigs of ram that I built a little over a year ago, currently hosted off of residential cable P.S. That's a nice looking backend
- pud 15y ago
  Several of my iPhone apps interact with a web service. As for your situation, my cable company's upstream is so slow that I wouldn't host anything on it. But if yours is fast and you like dealing with your own hardware, go for it. Maybe you'll be the next Rackspace :)
JasPanesar 15y ago
Customers don't care what you code in. Or what your backend is like as long as it works. They just want their lives to be easier. Use what you know, use it well, and make a difference. --- Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience. For examples, all web languages pretty much do the same stuff, and you'll rarely come across a web app that uses a language in a novel way that actually makes a difference which language you use. They all have their pros and cons, it just depends on what you want to coo / boo over. To be fair many haven't accessed the tools that may require money to use. Alternatively others might not have had the luxury of free time to learn something on their own. It's not better, or worse, just different. Sadly a lot of devs build wizardry to make their own lives easier and avoid tackling making their users lives easier, and that shouldn't happen in any language. All that matters is can you deliver a result that works well. If techies spent as much time obsessing over improving their skills and finding way to build valuable solutions than which tools to use, they'd know this. For those who hold a holier than thou attitude in believing the only way one can correctly create and innovate with a computer (software included) need to be from narrow list of tools/education fields, they forget that smart people can often learn to be great at more than one thing: "I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money." (Fortune) Steve Jobs Get building.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  "Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience." You'll find that even when you have first hand experience, you'll often be met with "well, you didn't do it right". Or "you need to do XYZ first - no one ever does foobar with XYZ first - are you stupid?". And so on. Even first hand experience isn't enough for some fanboys when you choose to reject their tools/languages.
  - JasPanesar 15y ago
    Lol, good point. It's kind of ironic that geeks who were picked/excluded/ostracized in school turn on each other in their adult lives and become snob/hipsters, instead of breaking the cycle. Love and power to anyone doing anything good out there with the tools that enable to do them. As for the fanatics who can't change the topic (to keep bashing) or change their mind.. I hope you can see the forest for the trees one day. Imagine what it would feel to be supported by a developer of any language and doing the same for others. We should cheer accomplishments, not berate, belittle and attack others without a track record of our own. When it comes to getting opinions, I learn a little more every day to ignore anyone who is a perfectionist and hasn't accomplished/launched/profited. It's the enemy. Scaling/rebuilding/whatever you're afraid of is okay when you're growing and profitable. No business built itself in one version. Remember, In 10 years you might have forgotten about the tools you're so passionate about today.
ebiester 15y ago
The only piece that made me cringe was CFML. I promise that a better life awaits you if you have the courage to break free.
- JasPanesar 15y ago
  Cringing aint so different than laughing ;) I work in 7-8 languages, was just wondering referring to my post: - What was your experience with CFML that made you cringe - Is it possible the same can happen in any language - What is better, in what way? Always looking to use better tools if they really get more done with less effort :)
  - ebiester 15y ago
    I will admit that my CFML experience is limited to studying it for an interview (that made me not want the job) and learning it well enough to read old source code for a new application based off the old. (The app was MX 7) My primary complaints were (as everyone) the verbosity - I've never seen a more verbose templating system, which led people to copy and paste all around. While there were some CFCs, those were mostly for tying to java backend. All this could happen in ASP, for example, but CF seemed to make it painful to do the right thing. Of course it could happen in other languages, but my experience let me to cringe whenever CF was mentioned. The OP used Microsoft already, so I'd look along those lines for him, even though my professional life is in java (95% javascript/HTML application with minimal templating from JSP)and my current weekend project is in rails. Razor looks like a nifty templating engine in ASP.NET MVC, for example.
    - JasPanesar 15y ago
      Verbosity is totally a pain. Interestingly, I didn't know ECMAscript (aka Javascript) is too verbose for folks out there. It turns out that CFML has two syntaxes, script and tag. The tag based html-type that's being discussed here, and and cfscript. Cfscript is is nearly identical to javascript and based on ECMAscript. Several languages follow ECMAscript. In a way, if you know HTML and Javascript, any language should be easier to pick up than a language that looks completely different from HTML and Javascript, no? Googled and found: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7ebf.html http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0... ECMAscript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
javadyan 15y ago
Somehow the overall appearance of the page at http://pud.com http://pud.com corresponds with the back end :-)
jsdalton 15y ago
Some weird part of me loves this, and I don't know why. That said, I'm very confused. The post says these sites are running off of your "awesome" backend: * http://www.pud.com * http://adhdinc.com But those are just pages with links to other services? Furthermore, while some of those services (TinyLetter, FaqMe) do seem to be produced by ADHD, others (Blippy, AdBrite) do not seem to be, though it seems you claim to have participated in them in some way, shape or form. I don't really care one way or the other, but my real question here is: Which websites in your list are actually running off of the backend described here?
- pud 15y ago
  On this stack: TinyLetter.com, FaqMe.com, and many of the other sites listed on pud.com and adhdinc.com. (and more importantly, not-yet-released stuff I'm currently working on). I co-founded both Blippy and AdBrite but did not have technical roles there, so they have nothing to do with this stack.
  - Goladus 15y ago
    www.adhdinc.com shows up as black text on a black background for me (firefox 3.6 windows 7). Using IE, it's black text on a very dark gray background. I can read it, but just barely.
  - jonah 15y ago
    Congrats on selling TinyLetter to MailChimp! [1] http://tinyletter.com/ http://tinyletter.com/ [2] http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/
kakuri 15y ago
If you don't mind working alone, work with whatever you like. If it's important to your business to attract the best talent, you need to use the best tools. I'm leaving my job largely because of tools & tech, and passed on a lucrative offer to pursue a different job with better tech.
iml 15y ago
I'm laughing at your front-end, actually.
- mattbillenstein 15y ago
  LOL! Is that a geocities page?
encoded 15y ago
I wonder if some of the laughing isn't so much at you and your stack, but at the laugher's experiences with those (or similar) technologies. We've all worked with technologies that cause us pain in our development process. Sometimes, the pain becomes so great that we look for, and find, something that we like better. Changing to this new techonology eases said pain, and allows us to be (or at least feel) more productive. I believe it's possible that some people laugh because they remember when they used one or more of those technologies, and the pain they felt while using it. They laugh and suggest other technologies because they assume you have the same pains they've had, and they'd like to offer you what they consider a better alternative that might ease some of the pains. After all, it worked for them! It appears that you've had some pains with this stack, but that you've found ways to deal with those pains that don't involve leaving your current technologies. Good for you. You've built successful applications on them. Also good for you. These are, of course, the things that really matter.
bobstobener 15y ago
I've built my product on CFML as well and I can't understand why it doesn't get more love from the developer community. It's a solid, productive language and the only language available in both commercial and open source (free) versions with tremendous support forums on both fronts. I personally use Railo for the CFML engine. Again, very productive and it enables me to get products to an MVP stage quickly.
- rmason 15y ago
  Bob, If you're not on 'CFML entrepreneurs' on Facebook you should be.
  - bobstobener 15y ago
    Thanks I'll check it out.
mattbillenstein 15y ago
What sort of traffic do you push through this infrastructure? Micro instances only have ~600MB of memory and I found them to be severely over-sold cpu-wise -- doesn't windows require like ~300MB of RAM to just boot? And Windows is only a penny more per hour on micro instances (although that is 50% more than Linux) -- but quite a bit more on larger instances should you ever have to scale up: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pric.. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pric... Re database choice -- http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is totally down right now... Thoughts? I dunno, just seems like a world of hurt should you actually have to scale up -- but presuming you do, perhaps you'd have the funds and/or resources to cover it anyway. Additionally, How on earth do you hire people to work in this stack?!?
stmartin 15y ago
Why, because it is retarded and can scale to a mom and pop shop. That's why.
joshu 15y ago
aren't micro instances heavily throttled?
- pjscott 15y ago
  Yes. Their main use is for really wimpy applications, or for apps that need occasional bursts of CPU -- the throttling allows bursts up to 2 compute units, but you get very little on average.
ary 15y ago
Cold Fusion? No, no... no. > CFML. I really like programming in CFML (a programming language, “ColdFusion Markup Language,” as opposed to ColdFusion, a commercial CFML interpreter made by Adobe). I know it’s not "cool" like Node.js or Clojure or even RoR. Doctors used to bleed people with leeches to get out the "bad humors". They stopped using that "tool" for a reason. It was a bad tool, and better "tools" came along. Not only is CFML not cool, it is hard for most people not familiar with CFML to understand [1]. The syntax mixes in with HTML markup in such a way as to make it very difficult to distinguish the two apart. With a syntax highlighter your mind still has a hard time as there isn't enough of a difference to make a subconscious context switch easy. Also, the need to cram logic constructs into HTML/XML-like syntax makes for some screwed up code. My understanding is that you can put the attributes for the tags in any order, and that means that things you'd always expect (in other languages) to appear in a certain order, like conditions for statements, are instead a matter of style [2]. > It’s got an old vibe. Not just because it was the first made-for-web programming language (tho it’s modern & updated frequently), but because whenever I meet other CFML coders, they’re always old dudes. My experience with CF developers is similar. This is not a good thing. This is nothing like the C and C++ graybeards you occasionally meet and develop immense respect for. These old CF developers are, in my anecdotal experience, the kind people that learned one type of development and stuck with it for a long, long time. They've not really improved their skill sets beyond what was popular practice when they first learned Cold Fusion. These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right. Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")? The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance. A lot of "you're a developer, but you really should learn about business" stuff gets posted to HN. This case looks to be turned around and we have a business person doing double-duty as a developer. My advice is to learn something more current, and not because it's cool. More current technology has business value in that it's easier to find people who can work with/on it, and you will be able to find more of those kind of people for longer. The underlying tech will also (usually) be supported for longer, and by a wider range of companies. The reasons are too many to comprehensively list here. I wasn't laughing at your back-end, by the way. It made me a little sad. [1] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm [2] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops.cfm http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops....
dreww 15y ago
this stack is... interesting. but the real problem, i think, with what he's saying, is that it is basically "i refuse to learn anything new that is not tightly bound to what i already know". it's true that the laughter is unnecessary, and the trends and hype can be obnoxious, but it is somewhat about the excitement of always learning new things and new ways to think.
qaexl 15y ago
(1) I have respect for people who can put a project together and get revenue flowing through it. (2) This technology stack sucks. (3) That your technology stack sucks does not mean you suck. (4) Maslow's Four Stages of Competence starts with Unconscious Incompetence. You don't even know you are unskilled. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence) (5) This isn't a popularity contest. (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) Being cool and being in the in-crowd has nothing to do with your technology stack. That goes for nerds too (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) (6) The tone of this article is defensive. The issues relates to identity, not technology. (7) Relax, people.
- abscondment 15y ago
  1-3 remind me of a great "I Can Has Cheezburger?" anecdote about being a successful CTO: http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to-be-a-cto/ http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to...
  - 3pt14159 15y ago
    I wish more people knew about FreshBooks' rewrite. They had horrible code. And they slowly morphed it into a php-python-ruby mix which is (from my dev friends there) pretty damn good now. It's ok to have a setup or tools that are fucked, but FB would never be able to hold onto developers or iterate quickly on their product if they hadn't sunk at least 9 man-years on the clean up. A million bucks for a slow rewrite is worth the price when it mitigates the risks of a failed from scratch rewrite.
    - qaexl 15y ago
      You ever played Weiqi? (Otherwise known as Go). Unlike chess, stones don't move once played. They can only be captured. On a 19x19 board, you have to balance short-term gains with long-term gains. Since there are no left-right or top-bottom orientations, you often have to reimagine where you draw the lines of territory as you play. Sometimes, you can kill your shapes by playing too many stones. Better players can see where things will go, identify "dead shapes," and stop wasting time trying to rescue them. Sometimes you trade off bad moves for bigger gains. Sometimes you simply have to work with mistakes you made in the early game. This is very much like writing code and getting it to market. You're trying to build something despite disruptive opposition even as the clock winds down.
freshhawk 15y ago
I don't understand what's so difficult about holding the following facts in your head at once: 1. Better tools make you more productive and make larger problems tractable. Using outdated or subpar tools seriously limits your options, especially if you need to compete with professionals. The simpler your problems, the less this matters. 2. It's easy to get sucked in to constantly learning the new language/framework/toolset when you enjoy learning these things, finding the balance between the diminishing returns of trying out new tech and being highly productive is difficult. Welcome to life. 3. Some people on the internet loudly engage in ignorant fanboyism, especially if they see smart people using their new piece of tech and figure they got onto a good idea early. 4. That same fanboyism defends crappy tools because it's human nature to feel that kind of tribal defensiveness when you've invested a lot of time learning and using something, this is especially strong when someone has all or most of their experience with a single tool or set of tools. Here's an idea: in the real world tools and productivity are tied in a complicated way. The comments "it doesn't matter what you use, just keep getting things done!" is just as stupid as "stop working on things and upgrade your skillset immediately!". Since this is aimed more at the commenters than at pud's submission I will say to him: You are impressively productive with that tech stack, it really doesn't look like it would be difficult for you to move to something more powerful than cold fusion at least. You seem like a pragmatic guy who can see the future payoff from that investment. You also look like a young guy who should not be ignoring the kind of commitment to life long learning necessary to compete in this industry.
hm2k 15y ago
The web page at http://xeround.com/ http://xeround.com/ is currently unavailable. It may be overloaded or down for maintenance. HTTP Error 503 (Service Unavailable): The server is currently unable to handle the request. This code indicates that this is a temporary condition and that the server will be up again after a delay.
st0p 15y ago
At the end of the day, making stuff work is all that matters. I would never have considered CFML or IIS or Windows as a webserver, but if it makes your stuff work and helps you make stuff work, why would I laugh at it?
blantonl 15y ago
For those of you that were not around during the dot.com implosion in 2000-2001, pud (the author of this blog post) ran the notorious site http://www.fuckedcompany.com http://www.fuckedcompany.com which gave an awesome view into companies that were going down the tubes during that time. good times... good times..
bitwize 15y ago
Because it's big. And dirty.
bobstobener 15y ago
Typical posts against CFML. "It's old." Well then so is Java, PHP, you name it. Actually, of all of those languages, CFML has the latest iteration (which is the most important stat). Railo and Adobe both have new updates ariving soon. Hey, how bout that JSTL huh? Morbid since the late 90's.
austintaylor 15y ago
Not using source control.
radagaisus 15y ago
I didn't even know CFML was an open standard. Check out cfwheels.org before you comment. It's a RoR like framework, and from 15 minutes of tutorials - it's actually pretty good. It handles APIs better than Django and deals with AJAX in a smart way. CFML verbosity and the entangled html is a downer though.
51Cards 15y ago
I'm not laughing, I run several sites on a similar stack and it all runs very well. I do run Railo though just because it runs circles around the native CF server (and I don't use any of the "high level" stuff Railo doesn't include), and I use mySQL 5.5, but all under Win 2k8 Server. I have dabbled in several other frameworks as well but I simply keep coming back to CF to get things done. Be it personal familiarity or platform flexibility or a combination of both, it's never come up short or failed to perform very well and that's how I judge something to be an acceptable platform.
- snow_mac 15y ago
  Do you blog about Coldfusion at all?
  - 51Cards 15y ago
    Not I. I have debated starting up a blog a few times but lack of time is one issue, and I'm also not sure anyone really cares to hear what I have to say :)
    - snow_mac 15y ago
      What resources do you read about cold fusion? (i'm new within the last 1 year to CF).
emehrkay 15y ago
I've killed a potentially great startup by trying to get the "code perfect"
samyvilar 15y ago
I'm not surprise people would laugh at this back end, it's sort of a who's who list of frow upon technologies, it's amazing how popularity contests are so prevalent in tech ...
eapen 15y ago
As a ColdFusion developer looking for a job in the valley, I also faced all the negativity associated with the language. In fact, I ended up barely mentioning the language on my resume. If the language was renamed to something else and totally re-branded, it would probably gain more respect. Most people still think of the older versions when it was built in C. But since the conversion to Java, it has been able to benefit from a lot of the Java enhancements while still functioning as a duck-typed language. Another advantage is that, it has a very short learning curve. But like with any tool, it can be used by amateurs to produce amateur looking code. Using a framework (eg. FW/1) encourages better structured code and OOP approaches. You can meet most of your web needs with ColdFusion and some highly specialized items may be more complicated. But that is the case with just about any language. The only part where I havent found sufficient documentation or user experiences related to scaling applications. That is not to say, it hasn't been done. Given the relatively high price of Adobe CF (compared to Ruby/PHP etc), it is not really an option that startups (in the Bay area) will consider. There are open-source CFML engines like Railo as the author notes, but unfortunately, it lacks publicity.
- bobstobener 15y ago
  Which is very unfortunate because Railo is a great product and, in several ways, superior to the Adobe engine. You're right about the branding aspect.
softbuilder 15y ago
So, he's got: * rapid development tools (at least for him) * scalable, low-maintenance backend * affordable infrastructure * automated deployment * automated backups This is almost a Joel Test for web startups.
perfunctory 15y ago
For a webapp written and maintained by one person it does not matter what tools you use. Just like it doesn't matter what tools you use to build a doghouse.
rbanffy 15y ago
I wouldn't laugh, but I am surprised it works. I have abandoned Cold Fusion in the late 90's - it kept hanging up, to the point of someone (me) having to write a program that detected the lockup and proceeded to restart the service. It may have become more reliable over the years, but I wouldn't know. CFML also has several drawbacks as a web programming language - the way it mixes presentation and application logic makes it hard to test properly and reminds me of what is wrong with a lot of PHP and JSP code out there. I am also surprised someone claims it's faster to work on Windows than it is on a Unix-like OS. Most of the things I do on servers are moving files around, installing/updating packages and occasionally restarting a daemon. For that, clicking and dragging on a remote GUI is much less efficient than issuing equivalent commands in a shell. I also read IIS progressed a lot since I last had to automate virtual server creation. Again, Apache runs on Windows and spitting (usually rendering from a template and adding custom values) a new config-file and doing a graceful restart appears simpler than right-clicking, form-filling and manually copying settings from one place to another. Windows doesn't even offer the courtesy of select/middle-button operation (unless you are operating IIS from the console). Like someone else said, unless your infrastructure fails miserably (and CF/Windows failed me long ago) your app won't suck because of the technologies it stands upon. A good idea implemented in CF, PHP or ASP is just as good as a good idea implemented in Django or Rails or Node or Lisp. It's just that it may be harder to evolve it over time, or make it scale, or deploy it in the first place.
oemera 15y ago
I'm little late here but I can't stop but write my response to this. I know the problem to laugh about code, backend or infrastructure. I know a lot of people are opinionated and if they don't like something you can't stop them firing on you. I'm very happy for you that you found a stack which works for you HOWEVER this doesn't mean that it works for others. A lot of programming languages, paradigms, frameworks and infrastructures just work for one guy on his greenfield project but while getting bigger things get lot harder and crappy cause it isn't modular enough or no-one understands "the legacy code" ect. At beginning it seems like you can't run into such problems but after a couple months of development this happens nearly in every project. You learning from these mistakes and get better with every project. There are a lot of things in software development people are talking about but you can only truly understand it when you came to the point where you have this problem people are describing to fix. For example a lot of my old colleagues are in love with PHP. They get stuff done with it and somehow they get code shipped but they don't go for elegance and having less code smells. They just go for "it works what you want more?". Software development is not only "it works" it is far more than that! Maintainable code, readable code, performance, architecture, elegance (for example: less readable code which covers the same as before) you name it. I found my self learning a lot from different languages, paradigms, people and different systems. For example what I love about linux is: I could write a automatic shell script to do anything. With Windows you can't! You just can't write for every step a shell script a lot of things are only available through the GUI. This bad. I don't like that. And I also don't like to run the GUI on a server. You are wasting a lot of resources here.
trebor 15y ago
I laugh at your backend because you need to exercise! (Just a joke, nothing more.)

348 points by pud 15y ago

alnayyir 15y ago

It's less laughing and more "first world paternalistic concern for a third world nation trashing about".

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

dclaysmith 15y ago

The synchronizing with Dropbox is pretty clever. Had never thought of that. Probably some latency issues--it wouldn't suit all cases but definitely would be a simple fix to a few problems I've had in the past.

kaeluka 15y ago
I use it for all of my dotfiles. A small script moves them to the ~/Dropbox/bckp/dotfiles and replaces them with a symbolic link. Also for my ~/scripts folder. It's wonderful to have access to those in a matter of minutes if you are starting with a new machine...
- mdwrigh2 15y ago
  For an alternative method, I do a similar thing but put them all on Github and have a quick script to symlink them to the right place. Easy to set up a new machine in minutes, and I maintain history indefinitely. https://github.com/mdwrigh2/dotfiles https://github.com/mdwrigh2/dotfiles
icebraining 15y ago
Do you (the plural you) really trust Dropbox Inc. enough to give them access to all your application files on your servers? Personally I don't use Dropbox for anything minimally sensitive (basically, anything that I haven't downloaded from the web) without putting it on a Truecrypt container. Maybe I'm just paranoid, though.
- Luyt 15y ago
  I'd use tarsnap.

acangiano 15y ago

In computing, there is an emphasis on the tools, rather than what you do with them. It's worth noting that it's not limited to computing either. Countless amateur photographers spend their time discussing hardware, rather than techniques and other aspects that would benefit their craft to a much greater extent. Personally, as much as I'm fascinated by the tools, I'm much more curious about what you do with them. So I'm always glad when I see someone succeed and create something useful with an odd stack of technologies. It reminds me to focus less on the tools and more on the creation process.

commandar 15y ago
>Countless amateur photographers spend their time discussing hardware, rather than techniques and other aspects that would benefit their craft to a much greater extent. You see the same thing among firearms enthusiasts. It's fairly common to find people that spend (tens of) thousands of dollars chasing the best gear, but won't spend $2-400 on training from a reputable instructor.
- earl 15y ago
  And snowboarders. People spend probably minimum $1k for clothes, boots, board and bindings; plus $70+/day for a lift ticket; but won't spend $50 to go to a group class and actually learn how to do it. And they're dangerous to everyone around them because they can't dismount a goddamn lift without falling down and probably knocking down their neighbors.
  - knieveltech 15y ago
    And climbers. Nothing like wading through a gibbering horde of prana wearing gumbies topropting with their $350 shiny new 70 meter bicolor ropes first thing in the morning at the crag. And kayakers. I've lost count of the number of times I've had someone's shiny new boat (closely followed by an expanding slick of random gear) float past me on class III+ runs. And hikers. Ever see a day hiker doing a mile and a half loop trail wearing a $350 hydration pack, $150 trail shoes clad head to toe in North Face gear? And blacksmiths. Endless are the rants on why a $800 Beverly throatless shear is infinitely superior to an identical model from Harbor Freight that costs a mere $90. And car enthusiasts. Ever see a $90,000 sportscar dinking around in traffic on a Saturday afternoon? See a pattern forming? People (mistakenly or otherwise) attach prestige to the latest expensive gear, regardless of the activity in question.

kokon 15y ago

Why must you laugh? If it works, why not?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nhashem 15y ago

This is great. Seriously. I cut my teeth in the early 2000s writing the type of PHP code that would make your eyes bleed. Global variables everywhere. HTML/PHP/MySQL in the same file. Career-wise I ended up going down a backend/database developer path, so if I do anything with consumer-facing web applications, it's on my free time. I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done is writing similar code to what I wrote in 2003. It's not quite as bad, but I continually succumb to doubt. Shouldn't I be using a framework? Wouldn't Python or Ruby be a better language to use now? Is it 'cheating' if I just throw these form elements in an HTML table? Shouldn't I be using something more scalable for the backend than a default installation of MySQL 5.1? And yet, every time I try and address any of the above, it just gets frustrating to me. I have a limited of free time to work on this web application each week. So I want to spend that time actually DOING things with my web application, not just ramping up on learning some stuff so that I can maybe do some things a few weeks from now. This web application is getting a bit of traction with users. I always figured that I would eventually "code myself into a corner," and that making these suboptimal technology stack choices would result in me hitting some local maxima that would bite me in the ass and I'd have to basically rewrite everything. But after reading this blog post, I feel a lot better about my choices. If this guy can make his web application work with the technology stack he prefers, then so can I.

wynand 15y ago
I have respect for people that can deliver, regardless of what they use. The allure of cool tech is strong but tech doesn't make products: people do. I cannot see what is wrong with your using plain PHP if you can get the job done faster (as long as you avoid things that make exploits easy, such as raw mysql db functions). When the time for a framework comes, you'll know. Stop worrying about what others think and good luck!
- JasPanesar 15y ago
  +1 to both of you!
  - 15y ago

rdouble 15y ago

What sites are running this hilarious back end?

barlo 15y ago
What makes this hilarious?
- rdouble 15y ago
  the title of the post
pud 15y ago
Several of these: http://adhdinc.com http://adhdinc.com and http://pud.com http://pud.com
- rdouble 15y ago
  Cool, thanks! How do you edit the Cold Fusion?
  - pud 15y ago
    Coda
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  [i]Please[/i] tell me that these animated GIFs and background MIDI on pud.com are parts of the joke.
  - j_col 15y ago
    My guess is they are, considering the footer says "This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0 or above". It's a cool domain though, how many three letter .com domains out there?

hristov 15y ago

Is that the same pud that did fuckedconpany? It was a hilarious site where people made fun of over valued companies during the first boom. Unfotunately the site eventually became overrun by nazis (not kidding) and had to be shut down.

pud 15y ago
Indeed.
- maukdaddy 15y ago
  Wow! Blast from the past! You might need to resurrect that site if the current bubble continues ;)
- puredemo 15y ago
  Why did you take that down? I've wondered that for years..

bcrouse 15y ago

I don't get it. Would anyone argue that you couldn't launch successful sites this way? Tools are made to improve the process and enable new possibilities; that's why use good tools.

PedroCandeias 15y ago

I don't hang out with a lot of programmers and I guess this is the reason. This "laughing" the op alludes to. This endless discussion of what language or back end is the best. I find it impossible to talk about programming with people who would rather indoctrinate me on the benefits of their chosen language than talk about, say, data structures. It's like arguing about what colour is the best. It's pointless. So big ups to pud for his post and his peculiar stack. In its own way, it's a very cool and imaginative stack. And it works, which I think is the only thing that matters in the end.

humbledrone 15y ago
Talking about the differences between, say, assembly language and Ruby is very different than arguing about what color is the best. I guarantee that some projects will be successful if written in one of those languages, and not the other (webapp in assembly? bootloader in Ruby?). Also, in your view, how is talking about data structures any better than talking about languages? Wouldn't that just be "indoctrinating me on the benefits" of your chosen data structure? If the only thing that matters is that the program works, then why does it matter what kind of balanced binary tree is in use behind the scenes, any more than the language matters? Tools do matter. Maybe you're not interested in incremental improvements in your productivity as a programmer, but those who are will probably spend time talking about their tools (hopefully balanced by spending even more time actually using them).
- scott_s 15y ago
  I think we was just trying to differentiate between advocating a particular technology versus discussing a fundamental idea. Using the examples that other people have given from hobbies and sports, it's like the inclination to discuss gear instead of the activity itself.
  - humbledrone 15y ago
    Discussing software tools as a programmer is nothing at all like discussing lenses on a camera. As far as I'm aware, there's no lens out there that can increase your productivity as a photographer by tenfold. Choosing Ruby over assembly language for a webapp could _easily_ increase your productivity by tenfold (probably more like a hundredfold). Obviously not every software tool discussion is as exaggerated as that, but even if you're arguing Django vs Rails, there really are significant differences that could affect your work in dramatic ways (e.g. one framework has a plugin that would take you a week to write, while the other doesn't).

reinhardt 15y ago

As long as Xeround sticks around and does what they say they can do, I’ll never have to worry about scaling my database Never heard of that database/company before so I clicked on the link out of curiosity and guess what, their server is down. Not very reassuring for an "infinitely scalable solution".

pud 15y ago
Well damn, you're right. Looks like they were Hacker News'd. Fortunately Xeround's database servers are still up, but this is a bit disconcerting.
- revorad 15y ago
  I wanted to give them a try but if a scalable database company can't handle HN traffic, it makes me think twice.
  - endtime 15y ago
    They may be using something cheap for their homepage because they (understandably) don't expect to get hit hard there.
jeromeparadis 15y ago
Didn't knew about them either. Not too worried about the home page having hickups earlier as it isn't their database cloud. But, I'll definitely do some testing around this/these MySQL MySQL cloud service(s). Something I haven't looked at before and sounds too good to be true.

fatalerrorx3 15y ago

You need elastic load balancing for iPhone Apps, do they call your web servers that often? How many users are you dealing with currently? Wondering if my single server in my house will be enough to launch a new web service shortly..the server is currently a quad core dedicated Ubuntu LAMP Server with 2gigs of ram that I built a little over a year ago, currently hosted off of residential cable P.S. That's a nice looking backend

pud 15y ago
Several of my iPhone apps interact with a web service. As for your situation, my cable company's upstream is so slow that I wouldn't host anything on it. But if yours is fast and you like dealing with your own hardware, go for it. Maybe you'll be the next Rackspace :)

JasPanesar 15y ago

Customers don't care what you code in. Or what your backend is like as long as it works. They just want their lives to be easier. Use what you know, use it well, and make a difference. --- Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience. For examples, all web languages pretty much do the same stuff, and you'll rarely come across a web app that uses a language in a novel way that actually makes a difference which language you use. They all have their pros and cons, it just depends on what you want to coo / boo over. To be fair many haven't accessed the tools that may require money to use. Alternatively others might not have had the luxury of free time to learn something on their own. It's not better, or worse, just different. Sadly a lot of devs build wizardry to make their own lives easier and avoid tackling making their users lives easier, and that shouldn't happen in any language. All that matters is can you deliver a result that works well. If techies spent as much time obsessing over improving their skills and finding way to build valuable solutions than which tools to use, they'd know this. For those who hold a holier than thou attitude in believing the only way one can correctly create and innovate with a computer (software included) need to be from narrow list of tools/education fields, they forget that smart people can often learn to be great at more than one thing: "I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money." (Fortune) Steve Jobs Get building.

mgkimsal 15y ago
"Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience." You'll find that even when you have first hand experience, you'll often be met with "well, you didn't do it right". Or "you need to do XYZ first - no one ever does foobar with XYZ first - are you stupid?". And so on. Even first hand experience isn't enough for some fanboys when you choose to reject their tools/languages.
- JasPanesar 15y ago
  Lol, good point. It's kind of ironic that geeks who were picked/excluded/ostracized in school turn on each other in their adult lives and become snob/hipsters, instead of breaking the cycle. Love and power to anyone doing anything good out there with the tools that enable to do them. As for the fanatics who can't change the topic (to keep bashing) or change their mind.. I hope you can see the forest for the trees one day. Imagine what it would feel to be supported by a developer of any language and doing the same for others. We should cheer accomplishments, not berate, belittle and attack others without a track record of our own. When it comes to getting opinions, I learn a little more every day to ignore anyone who is a perfectionist and hasn't accomplished/launched/profited. It's the enemy. Scaling/rebuilding/whatever you're afraid of is okay when you're growing and profitable. No business built itself in one version. Remember, In 10 years you might have forgotten about the tools you're so passionate about today.

ebiester 15y ago

The only piece that made me cringe was CFML. I promise that a better life awaits you if you have the courage to break free.

JasPanesar 15y ago
Cringing aint so different than laughing ;) I work in 7-8 languages, was just wondering referring to my post: - What was your experience with CFML that made you cringe - Is it possible the same can happen in any language - What is better, in what way? Always looking to use better tools if they really get more done with less effort :)
- ebiester 15y ago
  I will admit that my CFML experience is limited to studying it for an interview (that made me not want the job) and learning it well enough to read old source code for a new application based off the old. (The app was MX 7) My primary complaints were (as everyone) the verbosity - I've never seen a more verbose templating system, which led people to copy and paste all around. While there were some CFCs, those were mostly for tying to java backend. All this could happen in ASP, for example, but CF seemed to make it painful to do the right thing. Of course it could happen in other languages, but my experience let me to cringe whenever CF was mentioned. The OP used Microsoft already, so I'd look along those lines for him, even though my professional life is in java (95% javascript/HTML application with minimal templating from JSP)and my current weekend project is in rails. Razor looks like a nifty templating engine in ASP.NET MVC, for example.
  - JasPanesar 15y ago
    Verbosity is totally a pain. Interestingly, I didn't know ECMAscript (aka Javascript) is too verbose for folks out there. It turns out that CFML has two syntaxes, script and tag. The tag based html-type that's being discussed here, and and cfscript. Cfscript is is nearly identical to javascript and based on ECMAscript. Several languages follow ECMAscript. In a way, if you know HTML and Javascript, any language should be easier to pick up than a language that looks completely different from HTML and Javascript, no? Googled and found: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7ebf.html http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0... ECMAscript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

javadyan 15y ago

Somehow the overall appearance of the page at http://pud.com http://pud.com corresponds with the back end :-)

jsdalton 15y ago

Some weird part of me loves this, and I don't know why. That said, I'm very confused. The post says these sites are running off of your "awesome" backend: * http://www.pud.com * http://adhdinc.com But those are just pages with links to other services? Furthermore, while some of those services (TinyLetter, FaqMe) do seem to be produced by ADHD, others (Blippy, AdBrite) do not seem to be, though it seems you claim to have participated in them in some way, shape or form. I don't really care one way or the other, but my real question here is: Which websites in your list are actually running off of the backend described here?

pud 15y ago
On this stack: TinyLetter.com, FaqMe.com, and many of the other sites listed on pud.com and adhdinc.com. (and more importantly, not-yet-released stuff I'm currently working on). I co-founded both Blippy and AdBrite but did not have technical roles there, so they have nothing to do with this stack.
- Goladus 15y ago
  www.adhdinc.com shows up as black text on a black background for me (firefox 3.6 windows 7). Using IE, it's black text on a very dark gray background. I can read it, but just barely.
- jonah 15y ago
  Congrats on selling TinyLetter to MailChimp! [1] http://tinyletter.com/ http://tinyletter.com/ [2] http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/

kakuri 15y ago

If you don't mind working alone, work with whatever you like. If it's important to your business to attract the best talent, you need to use the best tools. I'm leaving my job largely because of tools & tech, and passed on a lucrative offer to pursue a different job with better tech.

iml 15y ago

I'm laughing at your front-end, actually.

mattbillenstein 15y ago
LOL! Is that a geocities page?

encoded 15y ago

I wonder if some of the laughing isn't so much at you and your stack, but at the laugher's experiences with those (or similar) technologies. We've all worked with technologies that cause us pain in our development process. Sometimes, the pain becomes so great that we look for, and find, something that we like better. Changing to this new techonology eases said pain, and allows us to be (or at least feel) more productive. I believe it's possible that some people laugh because they remember when they used one or more of those technologies, and the pain they felt while using it. They laugh and suggest other technologies because they assume you have the same pains they've had, and they'd like to offer you what they consider a better alternative that might ease some of the pains. After all, it worked for them! It appears that you've had some pains with this stack, but that you've found ways to deal with those pains that don't involve leaving your current technologies. Good for you. You've built successful applications on them. Also good for you. These are, of course, the things that really matter.

bobstobener 15y ago

I've built my product on CFML as well and I can't understand why it doesn't get more love from the developer community. It's a solid, productive language and the only language available in both commercial and open source (free) versions with tremendous support forums on both fronts. I personally use Railo for the CFML engine. Again, very productive and it enables me to get products to an MVP stage quickly.

rmason 15y ago
Bob, If you're not on 'CFML entrepreneurs' on Facebook you should be.
- bobstobener 15y ago
  Thanks I'll check it out.

mattbillenstein 15y ago

What sort of traffic do you push through this infrastructure? Micro instances only have ~600MB of memory and I found them to be severely over-sold cpu-wise -- doesn't windows require like ~300MB of RAM to just boot? And Windows is only a penny more per hour on micro instances (although that is 50% more than Linux) -- but quite a bit more on larger instances should you ever have to scale up: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pric.. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pric... Re database choice -- http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is totally down right now... Thoughts? I dunno, just seems like a world of hurt should you actually have to scale up -- but presuming you do, perhaps you'd have the funds and/or resources to cover it anyway. Additionally, How on earth do you hire people to work in this stack?!?

stmartin 15y ago

Why, because it is retarded and can scale to a mom and pop shop. That's why.

joshu 15y ago

aren't micro instances heavily throttled?

pjscott 15y ago
Yes. Their main use is for really wimpy applications, or for apps that need occasional bursts of CPU -- the throttling allows bursts up to 2 compute units, but you get very little on average.

ary 15y ago

Cold Fusion? No, no... no. > CFML. I really like programming in CFML (a programming language, “ColdFusion Markup Language,” as opposed to ColdFusion, a commercial CFML interpreter made by Adobe). I know it’s not "cool" like Node.js or Clojure or even RoR. Doctors used to bleed people with leeches to get out the "bad humors". They stopped using that "tool" for a reason. It was a bad tool, and better "tools" came along. Not only is CFML not cool, it is hard for most people not familiar with CFML to understand [1]. The syntax mixes in with HTML markup in such a way as to make it very difficult to distinguish the two apart. With a syntax highlighter your mind still has a hard time as there isn't enough of a difference to make a subconscious context switch easy. Also, the need to cram logic constructs into HTML/XML-like syntax makes for some screwed up code. My understanding is that you can put the attributes for the tags in any order, and that means that things you'd always expect (in other languages) to appear in a certain order, like conditions for statements, are instead a matter of style [2]. > It’s got an old vibe. Not just because it was the first made-for-web programming language (tho it’s modern & updated frequently), but because whenever I meet other CFML coders, they’re always old dudes. My experience with CF developers is similar. This is not a good thing. This is nothing like the C and C++ graybeards you occasionally meet and develop immense respect for. These old CF developers are, in my anecdotal experience, the kind people that learned one type of development and stuck with it for a long, long time. They've not really improved their skill sets beyond what was popular practice when they first learned Cold Fusion. These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right. Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")? The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance. A lot of "you're a developer, but you really should learn about business" stuff gets posted to HN. This case looks to be turned around and we have a business person doing double-duty as a developer. My advice is to learn something more current, and not because it's cool. More current technology has business value in that it's easier to find people who can work with/on it, and you will be able to find more of those kind of people for longer. The underlying tech will also (usually) be supported for longer, and by a wider range of companies. The reasons are too many to comprehensively list here. I wasn't laughing at your back-end, by the way. It made me a little sad. [1] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_tutorial.cfm [2] http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops.cfm http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/tutorial/coldfusion_loops....

dreww 15y ago

this stack is... interesting. but the real problem, i think, with what he's saying, is that it is basically "i refuse to learn anything new that is not tightly bound to what i already know". it's true that the laughter is unnecessary, and the trends and hype can be obnoxious, but it is somewhat about the excitement of always learning new things and new ways to think.

qaexl 15y ago

(1) I have respect for people who can put a project together and get revenue flowing through it. (2) This technology stack sucks. (3) That your technology stack sucks does not mean you suck. (4) Maslow's Four Stages of Competence starts with Unconscious Incompetence. You don't even know you are unskilled. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence) (5) This isn't a popularity contest. (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) Being cool and being in the in-crowd has nothing to do with your technology stack. That goes for nerds too (http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) (6) The tone of this article is defensive. The issues relates to identity, not technology. (7) Relax, people.

abscondment 15y ago
1-3 remind me of a great "I Can Has Cheezburger?" anecdote about being a successful CTO: http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to-be-a-cto/ http://www.scottporad.com/2010/11/12/what-it-really-means-to...
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  I wish more people knew about FreshBooks' rewrite. They had horrible code. And they slowly morphed it into a php-python-ruby mix which is (from my dev friends there) pretty damn good now. It's ok to have a setup or tools that are fucked, but FB would never be able to hold onto developers or iterate quickly on their product if they hadn't sunk at least 9 man-years on the clean up. A million bucks for a slow rewrite is worth the price when it mitigates the risks of a failed from scratch rewrite.
  - qaexl 15y ago
    You ever played Weiqi? (Otherwise known as Go). Unlike chess, stones don't move once played. They can only be captured. On a 19x19 board, you have to balance short-term gains with long-term gains. Since there are no left-right or top-bottom orientations, you often have to reimagine where you draw the lines of territory as you play. Sometimes, you can kill your shapes by playing too many stones. Better players can see where things will go, identify "dead shapes," and stop wasting time trying to rescue them. Sometimes you trade off bad moves for bigger gains. Sometimes you simply have to work with mistakes you made in the early game. This is very much like writing code and getting it to market. You're trying to build something despite disruptive opposition even as the clock winds down.

freshhawk 15y ago

I don't understand what's so difficult about holding the following facts in your head at once: 1. Better tools make you more productive and make larger problems tractable. Using outdated or subpar tools seriously limits your options, especially if you need to compete with professionals. The simpler your problems, the less this matters. 2. It's easy to get sucked in to constantly learning the new language/framework/toolset when you enjoy learning these things, finding the balance between the diminishing returns of trying out new tech and being highly productive is difficult. Welcome to life. 3. Some people on the internet loudly engage in ignorant fanboyism, especially if they see smart people using their new piece of tech and figure they got onto a good idea early. 4. That same fanboyism defends crappy tools because it's human nature to feel that kind of tribal defensiveness when you've invested a lot of time learning and using something, this is especially strong when someone has all or most of their experience with a single tool or set of tools. Here's an idea: in the real world tools and productivity are tied in a complicated way. The comments "it doesn't matter what you use, just keep getting things done!" is just as stupid as "stop working on things and upgrade your skillset immediately!". Since this is aimed more at the commenters than at pud's submission I will say to him: You are impressively productive with that tech stack, it really doesn't look like it would be difficult for you to move to something more powerful than cold fusion at least. You seem like a pragmatic guy who can see the future payoff from that investment. You also look like a young guy who should not be ignoring the kind of commitment to life long learning necessary to compete in this industry.

hm2k 15y ago

The web page at http://xeround.com/ http://xeround.com/ is currently unavailable. It may be overloaded or down for maintenance. HTTP Error 503 (Service Unavailable): The server is currently unable to handle the request. This code indicates that this is a temporary condition and that the server will be up again after a delay.

st0p 15y ago

At the end of the day, making stuff work is all that matters. I would never have considered CFML or IIS or Windows as a webserver, but if it makes your stuff work and helps you make stuff work, why would I laugh at it?

blantonl 15y ago

For those of you that were not around during the dot.com implosion in 2000-2001, pud (the author of this blog post) ran the notorious site http://www.fuckedcompany.com http://www.fuckedcompany.com which gave an awesome view into companies that were going down the tubes during that time. good times... good times..

bitwize 15y ago

Because it's big. And dirty.

bobstobener 15y ago

Typical posts against CFML. "It's old." Well then so is Java, PHP, you name it. Actually, of all of those languages, CFML has the latest iteration (which is the most important stat). Railo and Adobe both have new updates ariving soon. Hey, how bout that JSTL huh? Morbid since the late 90's.

austintaylor 15y ago

Not using source control.

radagaisus 15y ago

I didn't even know CFML was an open standard. Check out cfwheels.org before you comment. It's a RoR like framework, and from 15 minutes of tutorials - it's actually pretty good. It handles APIs better than Django and deals with AJAX in a smart way. CFML verbosity and the entangled html is a downer though.

51Cards 15y ago

I'm not laughing, I run several sites on a similar stack and it all runs very well. I do run Railo though just because it runs circles around the native CF server (and I don't use any of the "high level" stuff Railo doesn't include), and I use mySQL 5.5, but all under Win 2k8 Server. I have dabbled in several other frameworks as well but I simply keep coming back to CF to get things done. Be it personal familiarity or platform flexibility or a combination of both, it's never come up short or failed to perform very well and that's how I judge something to be an acceptable platform.

snow_mac 15y ago
Do you blog about Coldfusion at all?
- 51Cards 15y ago
  Not I. I have debated starting up a blog a few times but lack of time is one issue, and I'm also not sure anyone really cares to hear what I have to say :)
  - snow_mac 15y ago
    What resources do you read about cold fusion? (i'm new within the last 1 year to CF).

emehrkay 15y ago

I've killed a potentially great startup by trying to get the "code perfect"

samyvilar 15y ago

I'm not surprise people would laugh at this back end, it's sort of a who's who list of frow upon technologies, it's amazing how popularity contests are so prevalent in tech ...

eapen 15y ago

As a ColdFusion developer looking for a job in the valley, I also faced all the negativity associated with the language. In fact, I ended up barely mentioning the language on my resume. If the language was renamed to something else and totally re-branded, it would probably gain more respect. Most people still think of the older versions when it was built in C. But since the conversion to Java, it has been able to benefit from a lot of the Java enhancements while still functioning as a duck-typed language. Another advantage is that, it has a very short learning curve. But like with any tool, it can be used by amateurs to produce amateur looking code. Using a framework (eg. FW/1) encourages better structured code and OOP approaches. You can meet most of your web needs with ColdFusion and some highly specialized items may be more complicated. But that is the case with just about any language. The only part where I havent found sufficient documentation or user experiences related to scaling applications. That is not to say, it hasn't been done. Given the relatively high price of Adobe CF (compared to Ruby/PHP etc), it is not really an option that startups (in the Bay area) will consider. There are open-source CFML engines like Railo as the author notes, but unfortunately, it lacks publicity.

bobstobener 15y ago
Which is very unfortunate because Railo is a great product and, in several ways, superior to the Adobe engine. You're right about the branding aspect.

softbuilder 15y ago

So, he's got: * rapid development tools (at least for him) * scalable, low-maintenance backend * affordable infrastructure * automated deployment * automated backups This is almost a Joel Test for web startups.

perfunctory 15y ago

For a webapp written and maintained by one person it does not matter what tools you use. Just like it doesn't matter what tools you use to build a doghouse.

rbanffy 15y ago

I wouldn't laugh, but I am surprised it works. I have abandoned Cold Fusion in the late 90's - it kept hanging up, to the point of someone (me) having to write a program that detected the lockup and proceeded to restart the service. It may have become more reliable over the years, but I wouldn't know. CFML also has several drawbacks as a web programming language - the way it mixes presentation and application logic makes it hard to test properly and reminds me of what is wrong with a lot of PHP and JSP code out there. I am also surprised someone claims it's faster to work on Windows than it is on a Unix-like OS. Most of the things I do on servers are moving files around, installing/updating packages and occasionally restarting a daemon. For that, clicking and dragging on a remote GUI is much less efficient than issuing equivalent commands in a shell. I also read IIS progressed a lot since I last had to automate virtual server creation. Again, Apache runs on Windows and spitting (usually rendering from a template and adding custom values) a new config-file and doing a graceful restart appears simpler than right-clicking, form-filling and manually copying settings from one place to another. Windows doesn't even offer the courtesy of select/middle-button operation (unless you are operating IIS from the console). Like someone else said, unless your infrastructure fails miserably (and CF/Windows failed me long ago) your app won't suck because of the technologies it stands upon. A good idea implemented in CF, PHP or ASP is just as good as a good idea implemented in Django or Rails or Node or Lisp. It's just that it may be harder to evolve it over time, or make it scale, or deploy it in the first place.

oemera 15y ago

I'm little late here but I can't stop but write my response to this. I know the problem to laugh about code, backend or infrastructure. I know a lot of people are opinionated and if they don't like something you can't stop them firing on you. I'm very happy for you that you found a stack which works for you HOWEVER this doesn't mean that it works for others. A lot of programming languages, paradigms, frameworks and infrastructures just work for one guy on his greenfield project but while getting bigger things get lot harder and crappy cause it isn't modular enough or no-one understands "the legacy code" ect. At beginning it seems like you can't run into such problems but after a couple months of development this happens nearly in every project. You learning from these mistakes and get better with every project. There are a lot of things in software development people are talking about but you can only truly understand it when you came to the point where you have this problem people are describing to fix. For example a lot of my old colleagues are in love with PHP. They get stuff done with it and somehow they get code shipped but they don't go for elegance and having less code smells. They just go for "it works what you want more?". Software development is not only "it works" it is far more than that! Maintainable code, readable code, performance, architecture, elegance (for example: less readable code which covers the same as before) you name it. I found my self learning a lot from different languages, paradigms, people and different systems. For example what I love about linux is: I could write a automatic shell script to do anything. With Windows you can't! You just can't write for every step a shell script a lot of things are only available through the GUI. This bad. I don't like that. And I also don't like to run the GUI on a server. You are wasting a lot of resources here.

trebor 15y ago

I laugh at your backend because you need to exercise! (Just a joke, nothing more.)