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Another article on don't go micro services and don't reinvent the wheel. I wonder if most solutions could be implemented on top of Laravel/Django/Adonisjs with

Another article on don't go micro services and don't reinvent the wheel. I wonder if most solutions could be implemented on top of Laravel/Django/Adonisjs without too much effort.

gigatexal 3y ago
Yup. The logistics startup I joined nearly 7 years ago should have done the same. A single VM of say 4 cores and 8 gigs of memory and about 100G of disk would have been plenty for our proposed PoC and it should have run as a monolith. That’s what I would do had I to do it again. Instead what we did was what I call HN driven development: k8s, microservices, cloud. 7 or so months after I joined and on my way out we had nothing to show for it except for a really strong and capable front end dev who was basically faking functionality to appease investors because we the backend folks were so incompetent. (Man I sure have come a long way from those days. I was dumber then. I’m still dumb now — just not as much.)
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  HN driven development! It’s so true.
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  > what I call HN driven development: k8s, microservices, cloud I’ll give you cloud, but my takeaways from HN in the last few years have been things like: * Postgres is a reasonable choice for a job queue * SQLite is a valid choice for server db at quite large scale * k8s makes sense once you have 50+ devs * microservices address issues of team scale, not traffic scale
  - plugin-baby 3y ago
    + https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    Back in 2017 I think k8s was all the rage and all of us were reading it on HN I think. But what I, too, have seen is a greater emphasis on the boring, simple tools here on HN and I love that given all the experience and PTSD from the startup.
chipdart 3y ago
I think these stories tend to be based on a bait-and-switch angle. Minimum viable products only need to implement very basic functionality, just enough to get something out of the door. Limited tech stacks like Laravel/Django/Adonisjs can provide basic functionality, and sometimes a plain static HTML+CSS can serve that purpose as well. Except that micro services are an organizational tool, which just so happens to have important technical traits. When you start to develop your MVP to actually do something relevant to your business, and you start to assign responsibilities and accountability to specific people running specific projects, you create a need to peel out functionalities and data sources and to isolate loosely couple them from the rest of the service. You start to have a need to have teams work independently and autonomously. And that's where micro services come in. There are plenty of system design exercises that ask you how would you implement Twitter, and the first iteration is a monolith with a RDBMS. It quickly grows beyond that. Why?
- aerhardt 3y ago
  What is limited about Laravel or Django, exactly?
- pmontra 3y ago
  I'm not sure if your comment applies to Threads but if it does, and why not given the short time to launch, that Threads MVP had 100 M app downloads in the first 5 months. It's 4 orders of magnitude more than any customer of mine got in all the lifetime of any of their products. It's one order of magnitude more than what the mobile phone operator I was working for 20 years ago had after years from launch. I guess that it means that an MVP is all we need. OK, they started with the Instagram code base but as you write, the core of the product is a pretty standard exercise. I did it a few times myself for some customers along the years, Rails and PHP.
  - chipdart 3y ago
    > I'm not sure if your comment applies to Threads but if it does, and why not given the short time to launch, that Threads MVP had 100 M app downloads in the first 5 months. Irrelevant. I'm talking about the feature set, which is not determined by the volume of clients being downloaded. > I guess that it means that an MVP is all we need. The clients need content. The business, in order to make money, needs way more than that.
DarkNova6 3y ago
If you make websites for mid-sized companies and don't need to go beyond simple input-output. Then no. You can make large enterprise backends or similarly large projects but I seriously wouldn't advise any of those three...

Another article on don't go micro services and don't reinvent the wheel. I wonder if most solutions could be implemented on top of Laravel/Django/Adonisjs without too much effort.

gigatexal 3y ago

Yup. The logistics startup I joined nearly 7 years ago should have done the same. A single VM of say 4 cores and 8 gigs of memory and about 100G of disk would have been plenty for our proposed PoC and it should have run as a monolith. That’s what I would do had I to do it again. Instead what we did was what I call HN driven development: k8s, microservices, cloud. 7 or so months after I joined and on my way out we had nothing to show for it except for a really strong and capable front end dev who was basically faking functionality to appease investors because we the backend folks were so incompetent. (Man I sure have come a long way from those days. I was dumber then. I’m still dumb now — just not as much.)

throwaway2990 3y ago
HN driven development! It’s so true.
plugin-baby 3y ago
> what I call HN driven development: k8s, microservices, cloud I’ll give you cloud, but my takeaways from HN in the last few years have been things like: * Postgres is a reasonable choice for a job queue * SQLite is a valid choice for server db at quite large scale * k8s makes sense once you have 50+ devs * microservices address issues of team scale, not traffic scale
- plugin-baby 3y ago
  + https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Back in 2017 I think k8s was all the rage and all of us were reading it on HN I think. But what I, too, have seen is a greater emphasis on the boring, simple tools here on HN and I love that given all the experience and PTSD from the startup.

chipdart 3y ago

I think these stories tend to be based on a bait-and-switch angle. Minimum viable products only need to implement very basic functionality, just enough to get something out of the door. Limited tech stacks like Laravel/Django/Adonisjs can provide basic functionality, and sometimes a plain static HTML+CSS can serve that purpose as well. Except that micro services are an organizational tool, which just so happens to have important technical traits. When you start to develop your MVP to actually do something relevant to your business, and you start to assign responsibilities and accountability to specific people running specific projects, you create a need to peel out functionalities and data sources and to isolate loosely couple them from the rest of the service. You start to have a need to have teams work independently and autonomously. And that's where micro services come in. There are plenty of system design exercises that ask you how would you implement Twitter, and the first iteration is a monolith with a RDBMS. It quickly grows beyond that. Why?

aerhardt 3y ago
What is limited about Laravel or Django, exactly?
pmontra 3y ago
I'm not sure if your comment applies to Threads but if it does, and why not given the short time to launch, that Threads MVP had 100 M app downloads in the first 5 months. It's 4 orders of magnitude more than any customer of mine got in all the lifetime of any of their products. It's one order of magnitude more than what the mobile phone operator I was working for 20 years ago had after years from launch. I guess that it means that an MVP is all we need. OK, they started with the Instagram code base but as you write, the core of the product is a pretty standard exercise. I did it a few times myself for some customers along the years, Rails and PHP.
- chipdart 3y ago
  > I'm not sure if your comment applies to Threads but if it does, and why not given the short time to launch, that Threads MVP had 100 M app downloads in the first 5 months. Irrelevant. I'm talking about the feature set, which is not determined by the volume of clients being downloaded. > I guess that it means that an MVP is all we need. The clients need content. The business, in order to make money, needs way more than that.

DarkNova6 3y ago

If you make websites for mid-sized companies and don't need to go beyond simple input-output. Then no. You can make large enterprise backends or similarly large projects but I seriously wouldn't advise any of those three...