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Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

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Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#81

I’m not a solo business owner, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the ones who are successful turn their weakness into a strength by using some obscure tech stack that they’re a wizard with but that no one else uses. It’s a trite thought here on HN, but if I were a one-man shop I really would try to use a Lisp dialect.

Paul Graham, is that you?

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#82
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, yes It is not fit for my needs. Still a good product. As it is open source, you should make a github repo and invite contributors for the global translation module.

Yes, I could do that, but I could not support the users of e.g. a spanish version because my spanish is quite poor. This is why I settled for the german speaking market. That's Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Still enough money to earn :)

You really don't need to support any one. It is an OSS none can blame if you don't fix his issue. All you do is just invite him to contribute changes they want ;)

Think it like, I am an Indian and want this software in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. What I will do is grab your global English file, Translate the appropriate part of strings to my choice of language and push those changes to your software. which means user who are capable will support ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#83
For the past ten years at https://freeperiod.co.uk I have been doing php/mysql/jquery. Somewhere down the line I got into bootstrap as well. People were telling me my idea and execution of it were rubbish ten years and I guess I am still here.

I wouldn't worry too much about the stack of the day. Crack on and make something you can call your own.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#84
AWS EC2 instance running basic Ubuntu, Amazon RDS running MySQL, Nginx for SSL termination and proxy to application server, Lets Encrypt for SSL cert generation/maintenance, Apache Tomcat for said application server, Java codebase for REST services ( Jersey/Jackson and the odd Servlet ), Materialize for some visual JS conveniences, Plan ole HTML and JQuery for the rest of the front end.

It's a minimal stack with intentionally dead-simple architecture. Its the lowest common denominator in Boring Technology.

Someday when we scale beyond One Developer I don't want to be trying to hire the best Blockchain Rust DevOps Cloud Engineer Stanford CS produced last year ... I want to hire a contractor who knows SQL, HTML and has seen Javascript and Java.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#85
I'm running https://zerosearch.io on a single 16gb standard instance with 6 vcpus on Digital Ocean with the "Ubuntu Docker 5:19.03.1~3 on 18.04" image. The memory is important to keep an index for the top 1000 github repositories. It could probably do just as well with only one or two CPUs. The app is made up of two Docker containers: the indexer and the webserver. I'm using Cloudflare, which makes the site a lot faster and greatly reduces load on the webserver. For now there is no database. The code is a fork of https://github.com/google/zoekt, written in Go.

The stack is simple and easy to work with, locally and in prod.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#86
I built CoderTest [1]. It is an online screening platform to evaluate a software engineer’s technical abilities.

I'm using a combination of Node.js, Golang, React+Redux, Express.js, MongoDB, Redis, Docker, AWS Fargate, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Netlify, AWS SNS, AWS SES, Stripe and Github.

I managed to go from idea to product in 3 weekends. I could have built the same thing with any programming language and hosting provider, but not with the same speed. The result is that I am able to iterate and build much faster by using a tech stack that I am very familiar with.

[1] https://codertest.io

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#88

I run Pinboard. I have my own hardware running Ubuntu. The site itself runs PHP+MySQL, with perl scripts for backend tasks. I make heavy use of Twitter to talk about unrelated topics, and eventually people take pity and sign up for the site, using either Stripe or PayPal.

Thank you for running a straightforward reliable fast service long term without f-ing it up with feature creep or monetization rot.

I trust it and use it every day.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#89
post #65

Frontend - React / TypeScript Backend - Lambda / TypeScript Infrastructure - AWS CDK / TypeScript Kept in a monorepo, which means tightly-coupled code-sharing between all the different components. Definitely has it's negatives - but being in small startup (solo technical) also means lots of interruptions and chopping and changing. Having one language, stack, and repo makes it much easier to me to start, stop, and pic…

How’s your experience with CDK? I’ve been looking at it a few times and it felt a bit raw and not well documented yet. Did you have a solid AWS experience prior?

CDK experience has been mixed. Prior to GA it was all over the place, but it's gotten more stable now.

A lot of cloudformation quirks leak directly into CDK. And I've learned to be patient (e.g. one change at a time, roll though all environments, do adds and deletes separately...).

Right now using it is 50/50 for me. I'm assuming as more construct libraries become commonplace that will help the most (up until recently this was hamstrung by the amount of breaking changes)

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#90

Django, Python 3, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, uWSGI, nginx, Celery, RabbitMQ, Ubuntu, Ansible, Sentry.io, Gitlab, Hetzner, Cloudflare, Create React App. Effects on success: I already knew this stack (no time lost learning new tech), can run with a very tight budget (suitable for starting a business on the side). And, obviously, this is a great stack that will scale far into the future if needed.

Your tech stack is almost identical to Listennotes.com

https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behi...

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