I randomly started building UXWizz[0] 13 years ago, on a (not completely sober) New Year's Eve, and choose the most boring stack ever: PHP, MySQL, jQuery. The p

I randomly started building UXWizz[0] 13 years ago, on a (not completely sober) New Year's Eve, and choose the most boring stack ever: PHP, MySQL, jQuery. The platform has evolved so much over the years, but it's easier to maintain and install than day one, even if the codebase is 100x the size. I did do a refactoring in 2020[1], rewriting the entire front-end from spaghetti jQuery to TypeScript/React/MaterialUI, which you might argue is not the most boring stack, but simply "the norm" and a safe and easy and maintainable option. Now, three years later, I feel like I can make changes, add or remove any feature and create new ways to install the platform with ease (e.g. Docker? Simply add a COPY line in a Docker file using the LAMP stack to copy the PHP files; new UI element or page to display data from DB? Add a basic React component, a 5 lines PHP file with a MySQL SELECT query in it returning the data, and a fetch request). In 13 years I've seen analytics companies come and go, trends and stacks appear and disappear, and I think I've managed pretty well to keep up even with corporations with millions in founding while being myself a solo-founder and having worked on it mostly as a side project, I think this was the secret: keep the technology simple and focus on improving the current features as opposed to adding new ones. Also, be passionate about performance and simplicity: if you can make something both faster and simpler at the same time, do it now, it would save you so much time in the long run. This includes dev tooling too: like moving from webpack to parcel or vite (10s vs 1s build times, worth in the long run), or creating Gulp.JS tasks to automate manual process like uploading files, setting the file version in a readme file, and adding guards (if checks) like making sure you don't publish the dev version instead of the production one. Oh, and another secret: keep updating the libraries you are using: it's a lot easier to go from version v3 to v4 in 2019 and then v4 to v5 in 2021, then directly v3 to v5 in 2021. PS: Fun fact, when I started working on UXWizz (called userTrack before[3]), I started with the heatmaps and session recordings, it didn't have any stats/graphs for many years. Here's a screenshot of how it looked [4], [5]. [0]: https://uxwizz.com https://uxwizz.com [1]: https://docs.uxwizz.com/about/changelog#usertrack-3.0.0-beta-18-march-2020 https://docs.uxwizz.com/about/changelog#usertrack-3.0.0-beta... [3]: https://www.uxwizz.com/blog/rebrand-usertrack-is-now-uxwizz https://www.uxwizz.com/blog/rebrand-usertrack-is-now-uxwizz [4]: https://i.snipboard.io/B6xhu7.jpg https://i.snipboard.io/B6xhu7.jpg [5]: https://www.paldesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/userTrack-Wordpress-Plugin.png.jpg https://www.paldesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/userTrack...