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Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#41

Post by jarin »

kondro wrote: post #15
mkr-hn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall twitter originally being written in something that proved unscalable, so they had to switch. Can't remember what it was though.

It was Rails and, it wasn't that it wasn't unscalable but because they did it wrong then, they hired a bunch of developers that knew nothing about Rails, so of course they moved a lot of new and core development to other technologies.

It also had a lot to do with the fact that at the time Rails sites mostly ran on lighttpd or Mongrel, which was notoriously crashy (god was originally invented just to restart crashed Mongrels). From what I understand, at the time ActiveRecord hadn't yet been rewritten in C, which was also a big bottleneck for them (not to mention trying to scale MySQL to an insane level of traffic).

Nowadays, we have fancy stuff like Resque for background jobs, Passenger (aka mod_rails) for serving up Rails content, and a plethora of NoSQL databases.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#42

Post by Joakal »

For those who are a solo developer and get strange requests such as "I demand this to be in ASP/PHP/etc." With whatever language you use, program away and modify .htaccess file to display the desired extension of .asp/.php/.etc.

I haven't yet wanted to try this but get tempted.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#43

Post by a5seo »

The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision.

After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform.

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#44

Post by vyrotek »

noonespecial wrote: post #27
tejaswiy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact. It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

I'll have to agree with this... but its worth noting that there's a difference between ASP.Net WebForm and ASP.Net MVC.

I'm a huge fan of .Net (in fact my startup runs on it) but I absolutely hate the 'magic' that WebForms does for you.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#45

Post by chaz »

noonespecial wrote: post #27
tejaswiy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact. It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

Isn't this true of any language? ActiveRecord associations in Ruby on Rails are brilliant for getting code out the door, but the queries it produces along with complex lazy loading can make a database melt.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#46

Post by j_baker »

jswinghammer wrote: post #36

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well wi…

To be clear, there are valid reasons to use C#. I just don't think "nobody cares, besides C# developers are cheap and easy to find" is one of them.

(and while I'm leaving a comment anyway, I might as well apologize for the accidental downvote)

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#47

Post by gfodor »

I find this juxtaposition pretty funny:

"I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same."

and

"At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on."

If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your future acquirer just as much a customer as your, er, customers?

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#48

Post by j_baker »

krisrak wrote: post #38
j_baker wrote: post #5

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view i…

It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com

I agree. From the standpoint of what you can build a product using alone, any one of those is a good choice. However, I've learned that readability, along with being fun and efficient (from a developer productivity standpoint), is important, and the language makes a huge impact on all of these. I would argue that you can make say PHP readable, but it isn't necessarily going to be fun or efficient (but if someone can get all of those things, more power to them).

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#49

Post by andrewtbham »

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor.

If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#50

Post by j_baker »

a5seo wrote: post #43

The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision. After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-he…

It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with.

That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.

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