Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#1

Post by jonathan-kosgei » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

I've always been impressed by Discord's engineering culture and think they made most of the right decisions regarding their tech stack.

What other startups got their tech stack right?

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#2

Post by ayushgp » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

Zerodha. They are the biggest stock broker in India with a team of less than 40 people. Check out their tech blog for their tech philosophy: https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/

Also, WhatsApp with their choice of Erlang. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#3

Post by giraffe_lady » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

Slack using php.

Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#4

Post by dominotw » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 6:13 PM UTC

Early 2010 startups like github, groupon, shopify, gitlab for using Ruby on Rails to get off the ground and scale.

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#5

Post by infamouscow » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 6:56 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Slack using php. Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

A lot can be said for having an engineering team with the experience and maturity to recognize both strengths and weaknesses of their technology choices.

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#6

Post by actually_a_dog » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 8:11 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Slack using php. Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

What were their reasons?

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#7

Post by giraffe_lady » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

actually_a_dog wrote: post #6

giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Slack using php. Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

What were their reasons?

They wrote a blog post about it but it's been a few years since I read it. IIRC it centered on the inherently stateless request model and how that interacts with the way they wanted to do concurrency.

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#8

Post by kephasp » Tue, Aug 02, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

actually_a_dog wrote: post #6

giraffe_lady wrote: post #3

Slack using php. Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

What were their reasons?

https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#9

Post by dpeck » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

WhatsApp. Rick Reed’s “That’s Billion with a B” presentation is a good glimpse into their own view of it https://youtu.be/c12cYAUTXXs

Re: Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

#10

Post by atmosx » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

ayushgp wrote: post #2

Zerodha. They are the biggest stock broker in India with a team of less than 40 people. Check out their tech blog for their tech philosophy: https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/ Also, WhatsApp with their choice of Erlang. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...

The zerodha post is ... hard to believe. Self managed _everything_ and one devops engineer, no SREs? Who's managing the self-hosted PostgreSQL instances with the hundreds of billions or rows of _financial_ data?