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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).

#51

Post by kevinpet »

I don't think a startup that is not fundamentally technical has much to say about the merits of different technologies. This is a startup, and it's innovative, but it doesn't rely on the technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle for this kind of company. The company could succeed even if the technology were junk. Let's say he had a competitor who had a similar business model. They're competing on pricing models, advertising, convenience of shipping methods, turn around, and, yes, convenience and reliability of the website. But the last one is only a deciding factor if there's nothing more important in the other factors.

To summarize: nobody really gives a damn what you build your site in, if you aren't trying to do anything hard or innovative on the technology side.

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

#52

Post by j_baker »

gsivil wrote: post #31
j_baker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you start out, you're designing your site in hopes that someone other than your mom is going to use it. Usually, all you need is an app server and a database. I you get successful, that won't cut it. You usually need to start adding more and more pieces and rethink some technology decisions you made originally.

Thanks! I think I understand why the initial design/technology decisions would rarely make it to a product that has to be largely scaled. This makes perfect sense for almost all cases. Do you think that there are technologies that are inherently more scalable than others, so if some body was initially choosing them would stand more chances to scale up in a non painful manner?

Bear in mind that developer experience and smarts count for more than anything else (if you don't have those yet, don't worry - they will come with time, patience, and effort).

That said, I would say that languages and technologies that help you achieve a more modular design will help you scale more. This makes it easier to tear things out and move them around so you can alter your architecture much more easily than you would otherwise. And of course efficiency (in terms of code performance) doesn't hurt either, but I wouldn't choose something on that alone. If you can have efficiency and modularity, so much the better!

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

#53

Post by rit »

I noticed that both examples of companies he didn't want to compete with talent for (Tumblr and Etsy) are NY companies, so I wasn't surprised to see his company is in Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan).

The reality of course is in NY you're always competing for talent --- not just with the hot startups of the moment (Etsy, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc etc etc) but with the banks which are still paying big salaries for developers and solid benefits and bonuses.

The truth here - whether the author thinks the technology or not matters - is that he isn't competing at all for programming talent. He is competing for the kind of people who want to work at a hot startup, and have that mentality, versus a small one man shop. His statement "Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. " is telling.

Of course, its a completely unqualified unbacked statement.

But understanding the reality of what your talent shortages are caused by is important. I get the feeling that he went with the first technology he could hire people for cheap enough with.

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

#54

Post by noblethrasher »

vyrotek wrote: post #44
noonespecial wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, you don't have to use the magic of WebForms (as I'm sure you know). You can use it just like 'MVC' where the code-behind class definition is the controller. In fact, now that I think about it, the big difference is that the controller-view mapping is static in WebForms (with code-behind) and dynamic in MVC (method loads a view).

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

#55

Post by texel »

jarin wrote: post #41
kondro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

ActiveRecord was never rewritten in C. Twitter's problems stemmed from the fact that they had written a realtime messaging system, but designed it like a microblogging platform. The design wouldn't have scaled well, regardless of the technology they used.

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

#56

Post by dennisgorelik »

tejaswiy wrote: post #4
noonespecial wrote: post #2

The people who come along later to scale to those millions of users your site attracted might.

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

Thanks -- it's such a good talk. The final Q&A section of the talk is the best Q&A I ever saw. Aside of tons of insights Joel was gently picking up on Googlers (e.g. by doing search using Bing).

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

#57

Post by DjDarkman »

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies.

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation

I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it.

> Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is.

I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a product is more scarce than others than it will probably be more expensive, in other words: if there is bigger competition there are lower prices.

The premise is true, no one cares about the server side technology expect maybe programmers who will have to build on that... wait what?

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

#58

Post by jarin »

texel wrote: post #55
jarin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

ActiveRecord was never rewritten in C. Twitter's problems stemmed from the fact that they had written a realtime messaging system, but designed it like a microblogging platform. The design wouldn't have scaled well, regardless of the technology they used.

Oh you're right, I was thinking of the MySQL bindings (don't know where the original ones are at)

https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2

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

#60

Post by sokoloff »

gsivil wrote: post #31
j_baker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you start out, you're designing your site in hopes that someone other than your mom is going to use it. Usually, all you need is an app server and a database. I you get successful, that won't cut it. You usually need to start adding more and more pieces and rethink some technology decisions you made originally.

Thanks! I think I understand why the initial design/technology decisions would rarely make it to a product that has to be largely scaled. This makes perfect sense for almost all cases. Do you think that there are technologies that are inherently more scalable than others, so if some body was initially choosing them would stand more chances to scale up in a non painful manner?

Worry about the "nobody cares enough" problem long before worrying about the "oh crap, too many people care" problem. User apathy, aka "not enough traction" kills far more startups than inability to scale. Pick the ecosystem with which your company will be most efficient and agile, and cross the scaling bridge if you come to it. We've rewritten substantially all parts of our codebase and key infrastructure 2 or 3 times in the last 8 years. You'll get the pleasure of doing the same iff you have users...
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