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No sane person would kick off a brand new application that expects huge traffic on Django + PHP, right? This goes to show that technology stack is not as impor
by M4v3R 3y ago
No sane person would kick off a brand new application that expects huge traffic on Django + PHP, right?
This goes to show that technology stack is not as important as devs (myself included) sometimes made it out to be. And that old, boring, battle-tested framework and technologies can actually deliver.
- ryanjshaw 3y agoNobody uses Threads, that's why they're fine /s. But yeah, I used to get anxious reading HN and hearing about some new web tech stack. I thought my knowledge and expertise was falling behind. 99 times out of 100 the new stuff is nice, but not game changing, and the stuff I know is good enough.
- ben_w 3y agoEven stuff that's been around for a bit; I can't speak for web, but on iOS I'm still seeing a lot of cases of people merely experimenting with SwiftUI and not actually switching to it, because UIKit is still more useful.
- throwaway894345 3y agoI don’t have a dog in the fight, but it seems silly to use “what FAANG companies are able to make their tools do” to inform decisions for smaller companies.
- M4v3R 3y agoI'm actually writing an argument against myself, because I'm usually closer to the "let's use the new shiny thing" camp. But that article is a nice reminder that the new shiny thing is not the only way to go and the "old, boring thing" is as capable if used right.
- aprao 3y agobut Meta's versions are significantly different than the old, boring thing that you and I have access to. At my company, we are slowly rewriting our python services in golang because off the shelf golang incurs significantly less costs than off the shelf python on a per request basis.
- phyrex 3y agoMeta is actually contributing directly to upstream cpython. If you really wanted to, the internal fork is also open source: https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder
- poulsbohemian 3y ago>it seems silly to use “what FAANG companies are able to make their tools do” to inform decisions for smaller companies Yes, and yet for many years now that's exactly the perpetual mistake that so many companies - both small ones and ones not in technology - would make because they assumed that if Google did it that way, it must automatically be the best.
- actionfromafar 3y agoBut OTOH you can't really compare the fangs to other circumstances, they can boil the ocean with a new or old tech stack.
- melodyogonna 3y agoHaha, indeed. I found myself surprised when I learned Instagram is still using Python.
- talldatethrow 3y agoI worked in a Bay area co-working incubator type place a few years ago. Everyone lol'd that I was self taught and went with a namecheap shared hosting, PHP, and jquery. What about AWS or Google cloud at least? What about node? What about some fancy front end framework (I forget their names as theres like 5 and they're all the same yet all different). I saw several people drawn in their own tech stack drama, almost never creating a product. I put some PHP together and have 34 companies paying. It's a mess but I'd say that's more because it was my first real project, not because of php and jquery itself.
- SJC_Hacker 3y agoAWS and GCP aren't that expensive. The smaller instancss are ~$10 a month which is comparable to hared hosting. The good thing is you can spin up/down quickly, which is not always possible with some of those SHPs who want month-to-month commitments.
- redrove 3y agoIMHO all 3 major cloud providers are overpriced if you have just a simple service. Go with something simpler like Hetzner or DigitalOcean, Vultr, or better yet fly.io or similar if you can. AWS especially will just suck you in with all the complexity. If you barely have an MVP you’re doing it wrong if you’ve ever thought about IAM lol.
- talldatethrow 3y agoIt's all too complicated. One of the people at the co-working place was an AWS expert with tons of certifications blah blah. He spent months and thousands of dollars spinning up some insane micro services architecture for a product in the end he never got built as the real owner grew disillusioned with how it was all going. Price isn't the only thing to keep in mind.
- prmoustache 3y agoBut you only need to spin up/down quickly when you have huge variations in traffic which most small scale apps/service do not have.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago> This goes to show that technology stack is not as important as devs Facebook PHP isn't the same as the standard PHP engine though - they've spent 20 years optimizing their own compiler and PHP engine/infrastructure: > Overall, our experiments demonstrate that HipHop is about 5.5x faster than standard, interpreted PHP engines. As a result, HipHop has reduced the number of servers needed to run Facebook and other web sites by a factor between 4 and 6, thus drastically cutting operating costs. https://research.facebook.com/publications/the-hiphop-compiler-for-php/ https://research.facebook.com/publications/the-hiphop-compil...
- duskwuff 3y agoNB: that's from 12 years ago. HipHop didn't last long; a JITted PHP runtime (HHVM) replaced it at Facebook a few years later. Vanilla PHP also got a lot faster around versions 7 and 8.
- vincent_s 3y agoThe comparison was made in 2012 with PHP 5. PHP 8 is out now and likely includes most of Facebook's improvements. PHP 8 should be fast enough for any web app or backend.
- Ralfp 3y agoA lot of Facebook those days is Node.js, Rust or Python. Its no longer PHP heavy like it used to be.
- SJC_Hacker 3y agoWhen you have buckets of money to throw at cloud spend, then yeah the tech stack might not matter quite as much. "Just throw more hardware at the problem" can sometimes work.
- Maxion 3y agoDjango + DRF is still fine, and is still a good choice. Especially for smaller projects that are expected to have a long lifetime with few resources available for maintenance. Django is stable, well-known, and offers very long LTS. It's easy to find people who have experience on it, it is well documented and performs well enough for 95% of exiting websites. You can quite easily convert DRF serializers to TS types/models, that you can then use in your preferred flavor of frontend framework.
- aerhardt 3y agoI work with Django and while it’s true there is an unshakeable old-school vibe to it (Is it the docs? The SO posts from 2009? The source code with plenty of Python 2 era code?), other than proper async support, I don’t feel anything about it prevents me from making modern apps. I like my clients separate, so I do. And if I had to build a system with different services (without a specific async requirement), then I might as well patch a few Django services together…