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Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

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Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#31

Post by 16mb »

osler wrote: post #12

How come I don't see anyone recommending ruby and ruby on rails? I am curious as I am going this route.

As much as I love ruby and the rails structure, and while I continue to write projects with rails, I no longer really recommend it to peers.

The TS/JS ecosystem is just much larger and that comes with newer libraries, tools and has better support. Getting setup with a basic CRUD rails app is quick, but the more advanced work; auth, deployments, scale, etc. can be frustrating for newcomers.

Not a fan of how they’re going all in on Hotwire. Although I haven’t been following those advancements much lately.

They really need to have some easy way to just roll their api only mode with a stand alone frontend, along with documentation on configuring that.

You just can’t beat the proficiency of using the same types on front and backend. I did enjoy trying out redwoodjs.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#32

Post by fourside »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #27
osler wrote: post #12

How come I don't see anyone recommending ruby and ruby on rails? I am curious as I am going this route.

Because Hacker News is a horrendous place to gauge technologies.

Seriously, some of the responses make me think that they weren’t written by freelancers.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#33

Post by davedx »

React and TailwindCSS for everything now. I'm fed up of churn, fed up of the constant stream of new UI toolkits and static site this and Next that and Svelte the other.

I spent my "new technology budget" on upgrading most of my projects to vite, which already kind of annoyed me, but it does seem a tad faster than Webpack and keeps my projects from bitrotting away so, eh.

I actually increased my use of React in the last year or so by using it to render to HTML/PDF on the back-end now as well, combining it with weasyprint or puppeteer to pump out the final PDF's.

To be clear: I currently try to build everything web related (websites, static pages, webapps, PDF's, electron apps) with React now.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#34

Post by kevinsync »

p2hari wrote: post #11

As you might know not one tool fits all, I still have strong preferences for the following. It helps me get going faster and get things done right first time and helps in ease of maintenance. Language: Typescript. Frontend Framework: Astrojs [1] or qwik [2] Frontend Library: React if it requires 3d and other frame-motion like animations, else will not use any frontend library or might throw solidjs if required for so…

This list is great, and fascinating because I haven't heard of most of it and don't use a single thing on it for my personal or client projects.

I appreciate seeing what stacks work for other people, and also very much appreciate the illustration of how NOT homogenous things actually are out there in the world (despite certain blogs and developer influencers trying to convince you otherwise)

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#35

Post by yau8edq12i »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…

You're going to make cross-platform native apps for the local pizza shop who wants to display opening hours and the menu on some kind of webpage? No one here is going to agree with you because the question is specifically about building websites as a freelancer, and you're replying something akin to "don't make websites, trust me I'm not a freelancer." Well okay then?

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#37

Post by rambambram »

nine_k wrote: post #29
rambambram wrote: post #25

I work daily on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB. I run Raspberry OS with a local Apache2 server. I use gedit (Gnome text editor, only syntax highlighting, line numbers and a little file browser) to program PHP, MySQL and a little Javascript. GIMP I use for editing photos and creating images (also for print). Kdenlive works for editing small to medium size videos. Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Rhythmbox and SuperTuxKart…

GEdit is nice as is, but there are language server plugins e.g. if you need better navigation.

I'm testing some plugins now. They don't really add to my workflow, it seems. But I have a very simple workflow and my code base is small enough.

What I would like to see is a shrinked code overview to fit the full vertical size of the scroll bar. And some way to find selected occurrences in other files in the code base (same directory, possibly other files).

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#38

Post by seafoamteal »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #13

No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…

Native apps certainly do have their plus points, but for use cases like small local business that customers will order from pretty infrequently, a website is the way to go. I don't want another app on my phone that I'll use once and then never again for a year or so. And of course, websites are still the way to go when you just want to put some information up publicly for people to access without any interactivity involved. You wouldn't have an app just to display your store services and timings.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#39

Post by icedchai »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #20

Laravel for any business type App. It's super easy to deploy, writing custom business logic is easy. There's RAD libraries like Orchid if you need basic UI for the users. There's baked in everything from SMS messages, Payment procesing, Oauth, 2FA, API endpoints and so much more. Laravel has "Spark" which is a Saas specific starter kit you can utilize too. PHP is easy to deploy, easy to host, and easy to sub-contract…

When I was doing freelance work, PHP/Laravel was always what I used. It's incredibly simple to deploy compared to the modern "cloud native" stack I use at my day job.

Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

#40

Post by murshudoff »

As a team we use - NextJS (AppRouter) for the UI, TailwindCSS + shadcn ui - Custom CMS built on top of Strapi for the backend - We use self-hosted GitLab and for every project we have CI/CD by default. - For every project (even simple landings) we use server from Contabo. It’s like 6$ for 6GB RAM and 400GB SSD - Everything is dockerized and gets deployed using gitlab-runner. - Traefik is used as reverse-proxy - Minio is used as a storage (with some tweaks for caching) - Postgres is DB of choice

Everything lives as scripts. Only Next UI is developed from scratch for each customer.

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