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Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

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Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#51

Post by perilunar »

hungerstrike wrote: post #49
perilunar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This site, like many, has a large international audience. Don't assume your local (and illogical) format is your users'. It just confuses people. Use an unambiguous format: use 8601 or spell out the month.

That's my point exactly. It's an international audience but it's also an informal social environment where we can't expect everybody to be cognizant of that fact at every moment and make adjustments for it. As such, you shouldn't be too strict about what you feel is the "logical" way of doing things. Anyway, according to alexa, the great majority of HN readers are from the US - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombina…

> the great majority of HN readers are from the US

57.5% is not a 'great majority'. It's only slightly more than half!

> we can't expect everybody to be cognizant of that fact

That's why I remind people. Use international standards/formats and be less insular. (And FFS, go metric ;)

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#52

Post by swat535 »

I am going to go against the grain here and say you should pick with whatever you are most skilled at and feels natural to you.

Unless you have very specific requirements, it matters very little; especially if your goal is to push a product

Nowadays there are many options and a lot of them are reliable.

E.g

Rails, PostgreSQL, React

Django, PostgreSQL, VueJs

Phoenix. PostgreSQL, Jquery

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#53

Post by hungerstrike »

perilunar wrote: post #51
hungerstrike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point exactly. It's an international audience but it's also an informal social environment where we can't expect everybody to be cognizant of that fact at every moment and make adjustments for it. As such, you shouldn't be too strict about what you feel is the "logical" way of doing things. Anyway, according to alexa, the great majority of HN readers are from the US - https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombina…

> the great majority of HN readers are from the US 57.5% is not a 'great majority'. It's only slightly more than half! > we can't expect everybody to be cognizant of that fact That's why I remind people. Use international standards/formats and be less insular. (And FFS, go metric ;)

57% is the greatest number on that chart. I didn’t see any other number past say 9% if I remember correctly. (It was actually 6%.) That’s the great majority.

Yes, be less insular too... however please try to do it in a non-snarky way that won’t provoke the other human beings.

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#54

Post by handbanana »

vatotemking wrote: post #43

The simplest stack for me is: Frontend - Plain HTML/CSS/JS Backend - Node, Express with Nunjucks for templating If I want to get a bit fancy: Frontend - Vue, Bootstrap4 Backend - Node, Express, Nunjucks DB - SQLite3 using Sequelize as ORM Surprisingly, you can accomplish lot of stuff with the second setup. If im going to deploy to production: Provider - Either small DO droplet ($5.00) or tiny AWS (free) Webserver - n…

I like that set up.

For me its ejs over nunjucks. Mysql, and no ORM. I'd also probably use something like elastic beanstalk vs piecing it all together myself - to keep things simple.

And I'd use sendgrid over mailgun, primarily for deliverability but also I find their service/api/dashboard very user friendly.

If taking payments I'd use stripe

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#55

Post by madmax108 »

hungerstrike wrote: post #46
madmax108 wrote: post #38

The correct answer as of ${any_date_in_any_esoteric_format} is: - It depends on what you are trying to build. Basic web app can be anything from a Trello clone to Instagram. Each has it's own limitations. - Go with what is tried and tested. Pick up something that is supported, where if you get stuck you can reach out to people for a fix. One of the few good things of the clusterf k that the current JS ecosystem is is…

I'm just wondering if you're not from the USA? Because that date format is very common here particularly for written dates. Whenever I write a check or sign and date something, that's how I write it.

Nope I'm not, though I work at a company with 2 engineering offices in MV and Dallas. Just FYI: Other than the USA, this format is not used anywhere else:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/stackabuse/media/date-formats-world...

Working with a global company, I tend to use 29 Mar 2018, which is much more unambiguous (and in code we usually use yyyymmdd, which makes it easier to search for logs/output of a year/month/day etc.).

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#56

Post by gremlinsinc »

swat535 wrote: post #52

I am going to go against the grain here and say you should pick with whatever you are most skilled at and feels natural to you. Unless you have very specific requirements, it matters very little; especially if your goal is to push a product Nowadays there are many options and a lot of them are reliable. E.g Rails, PostgreSQL, React Django, PostgreSQL, VueJs Phoenix. PostgreSQL, Jquery

But you're saying back/frontends don't matter...but definitely use postgres... lol

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#57

Post by gremlinsinc »

Guest9812398 wrote: post #15

I use a basic LAMP stack (CentOS, Apache, MariaDB, PHP 7). No frameworks. Some of my projects are quite large (tables with billions of rows, and over a million users). It might not be fashionable, but it works, it's fast (for development, and for end-users), it's well documented, and it's been tested for decades. I have no plans to change, and my new projects in development are using the same.

The problem with this is, when you pull in new developers - it takes them weeks or months to understand everything. Whereas a Laravel app, they need maybe a few days at best to figure out what design principles you're using and what style, and where you put repos/models and such, but then they're good to go.

I hate working on code where some systems engineer from the 80's thinks they're big and bad and can code an awesome website using just propel + plain php and then expect every new dev to just learn it and love it as much as they do.

Re: Ask HN: What stack should I use to build my basic web app as of 3/29/18

#58

Post by gremlinsinc »

julvo wrote: post #5

Do I sense a bit of sarcasm regarding longevity of JS frameworks here? As other commenters say, if you want results, choose whatever stack you are most productive with. As you say 'basic' web app: I'd recommend using Firebase, if you are comfortable with the vendor lock-in. For auth, database and deployment it doesn't get much simpler than this.

Strapi is something I've been looking at as a self-hosted firebase competitor for just an api for mobile apps, etc.. It's pretty cool, when I don't want to build out a full-fledge laravel app.
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