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Show HN: We Use That. What startups use to get stuff done
- daniel_levine 14y agoHi all, we are launching We Use That and would love any feedback. More cool companies to come and anyone can submit their company via pull request https://github.com/weusethat/we-use-that https://github.com/weusethat/we-use-that
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pizza 14y agoDefinitely definitely put that at the top of your front page!
- oacgnol 14y agoSomething I'd like to see is also the personal setup of the interviewee(s), for example, coding environment or Mac/PC preference.
- bti 14y agoDon't know if you are already aware of http://usesthis.com http://usesthis.com. Some of the developers they interview get pretty in depth with their setups.
- jedberg 14y agoWhy only startups? Wouldn't it be interesting to know what non-startups use? I can see how it wouldn't be all that useful to have a full stack of Oracle and Peoplesoft, but a lot of big companies are built on the same stuff that startups use.
- daniel_levine 14y agoWe would love to have some bigger companies as long as they still try new things. For bigger companies we might do it by product. Instead of Google, Gmail and so on
- SCdF 14y agoIf anything (imo), startups are the least interesting company size / maturity when looking at technology stacks, since they have neither grown enough or been around long enough for their choices to actually matter, (on the other hand, really large/mature companies are likewise uninteresting, because their choices are almost certainly entrenched in historical BS and legacy nonsense.)
- asm89 14y agoYou should add http://weusethat.com/ http://weusethat.com/ to the description of the repository and as the url of the github user (not an org?). Right now there is no link to click!
- daniel_levine 14y agoGood point!
- eranation 14y agoNice... was looking for something like this Is the data going to be available in a structured way? It think of trend tables, use counts, graphs, you know...
- daniel_levine 14y agoWe're starting out with the interview format but we definitely have plans to use the data in different ways.
- danso 14y agoThis is similar to what was done with developers, right? The one thing I wished that had -- as well as WeUseThat -- is actual entities per question. For example, for Pulse's answer to the stack question: * Google App Engine * AWS * Hive * S3 * Redis * Django * Backbone * ASI * MBProgressHUD That way, you could provide a view that showed most popular solutions. Or, if I click on the "Backbone" tag, I see every company that is using it. It'd be a non-scientific way to compare the popularity of components. If you want to get fancier, you could have it be a delimited list: Name of product|Category|Purpose at company If the backend has this data, then we can see popular solutions by category, such as JS frameworks. Obviously, it wouldn't be hard to go through the few entries you have now and pick out the entities, but better to have a system in place early on before you expand too much. I think a view that allows sorting by tech product and comparing usage would be very useful. I'm not saying ditch the interview format, just provide multiple ways to view the datapoints given. For the front page, I'd also reduce the size of the logos. Otherwise, great start, this is something that will be very useful to developers.
- daniel_levine 14y agoYes, it's similar to The Setup (http://usesthis.com/ http://usesthis.com/), which we're big fans of. We will definitely do this kind categorization but wanted to get a bit more data first and also see if people wanted it. So thanks :)
- waferbaby 14y agoHooray! I don't know if you wanted to look at the newer version of The Setup, but it's now Sinatra-based with a MySQL backend, and all the software/hardware is nicely organised. I can dump that out for you, if that'd help.
- daniel_levine 14y agoGlad you like it! Big fans of yours! We might take a look but I suspect we will go custom pretty quick. We Use That is a side project for us so we plan on experimenting with as much as possible. Thanks for trail blazing!
- danielweber 14y agoWhat in the world is this? Is there actually a start-up that exists to list what technologies it uses?
- bithive123 14y agoI think it's a great idea, startups can spend less time and energy to stay "on trend" and focus more on creating new trends.
- dannyr 14y agoSeriously, stop the negativity. HN is for community of people who build. He built something that he thinks will be useful to other people. If you want to criticize, do it constructively. What have you built lately?
- delluminatus 14y agoI think you might be confused by the name. If you looked at the site you would see that it lists what other startups use.
- danielweber 14y agoIndeed. The incredibly vague titles on HN combined with vague articles are a source of frustration to me. I thought this was just TechCrunch where you get listed via git, but you helped me see what's going on. I'm sure in their A/B testing people thought it was much cooler to have giant logos on their front page instead of explanatory text.
- daniel_levine 14y agoTried a more descriptive title but too long and then i think it got modded. With so many yc companies it might have seemed like too much pandering.
- southphillyman 14y agoCan't front...this made me literally laugh out loud.
- dudurocha 14y agoI would love to see some company that handle videos.
- daniel_levine 14y agowould Zencoder qualify? We should have an interview from them in the next week or two
- kodablah 14y agoI especially like the interviews that explain why they chose one service over another (even if their views may be incorrect or skewed). My favorite part, however, is the "What business software do you most wish existed" section. Once more interviews get posted (removing the small sample size), others can use these as startup ideas themselves.
- AtTheLast 14y agoI'm just getting into programming and something like this would be really cool. If I saw that my favorite company was using certain technology I might try to learn that first. If you could also take snapshots of a start ups stack it would be cool to see how it evolves. Keep going with this and good luck.
- imperialWicket 14y agoI think this is excellent, and that the general consensus here to add more data structure and drilling/reporting is a great idea. I was a little disappointed that there isn't an auto-biographical interview. The meta post of "We Use That Uses..." seems like an easy add.
- daniel_levine 14y agoWe didn't want to become too enamored with ourselves but i definitely think we will do a meta post.
- imperialWicket 14y agoThe first point still stands - I like the product. I also appreciate the humility angle. Maybe an easter egg, buried on the about page?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- praveenhm 14y agoGood collection for a startup
- ehutch79 14y agoIt's not clear at first that the things we're looking at are the companies, not the elements of the stacks in use. Many of them are themselves parts of other peoples stacks. I'm worried that this is proof that a lot of the big darlings of the 'industry' are really just feeding off each other's venture capital.
- jhuckestein 14y agoIt would be very to get reports for these kinds of questions across many industries and company sizes. I especially like the forward-thinking questions such as what do you need. Does anyone know if Gartner or some other company provides this? Otherwise it seems like it would be worth a lot of money to many people
- daniel_levine 14y agoYou read our minds
- shloimtothee 14y agoCool idea.
- lightyrs 14y agoSomewhat related, I start next week at BestVendor: http://bestvendor.com http://bestvendor.com
- kvar 14y agoalso like http://www.whohostswhere.com/ http://www.whohostswhere.com/
- sohooo 14y agoI wonder if anybody uses asana[1] to manage there tasks. I saw that it's free for teams up to 30 members. [1] http://www.asana.com/product http://www.asana.com/product
- kgosser 14y agoI love this kind of stuff. Keep it coming!
- genwin 14y agoSame here. I come to HN in hopes of finding such good info.