Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 136 posts

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

#71

Post by gsivil »

sokoloff wrote: post #60
gsivil wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

I completely agree with you. I think that in the 99.99% of the cases the question of scalability is related with a pseudo-problem or at best a good problem to have.

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

#72

Post by georgieporgie »

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…

> Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care.

He pretty much covered that by talking about the cool kids, and about the space he's in being about bodies.

His goals probably depend more on having average work done steadily than awesome work done when it's cool to do.

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

#73

Post by kenjackson »

DjDarkman wrote: post #57

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…

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

I find this hard to believe.

Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.

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

#74

Post by kenjackson »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
mwdev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this sounds like my friends who didn't want to go to UT because it 'was too big'. The awesome thing about too big is that if you look hard enough you are almost assured of finding someone like you. Yes there are crappy c# developers. I've also seen some bad ass c#.

Right, "biasing your talent pool" doesn't mean that everyone in that talent pool sucks. There are certainly some very talented C#/.NET devs. The problem is that when you go to hire, you have very little information about just how badass a prospective dev is, unless you've worked with them before. So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. http://ww…

So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool.

That was probably true in 1995. But not today. Python has become the new Pascal/Java. Commonly the intro language in CS, so you have a lot of students who graduate using Python regardless of skill.

If you said Haskell, then probably. Actually C++ maybe more then either, surprisingly.

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

#75

Post by tjogin »

jrockway wrote: post #37

"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best." Sure, that makes sense. (It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)

That's my go-to argument when choosing languages.

Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones)

At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in question has his eyes and ears out there, finding things out on his own, trying things, reading stuff. There are a lot of cubicle programmers who simply don't; that find out about things when things are added to Visual Studio.

Not saying obscure languages are better in and of themselves (well, maybe just a pinch), just that the opposite isn't true. Easy access to droves of average to poor programmers is not a feature.

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

#76

Post by a5seo »

j_baker wrote: post #50
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…

Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.

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

#77

Post by danshapiro »

makmanalp wrote: post #24

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

Lots of things that you or I think are unique and special can be modeled as commodities. VCs model startups as commodities when they're preparing forecasts. Recruiters model high powered executives as commodities when they're preparing an interview pipeline. Like all abstractions, it's sometimes useful, and sometimes misleading. Certainly it's nothing worth getting excited about as a passing comment by the author.

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

#78

Post by j_baker »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #64
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…

"And more fun = easier." That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to. What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" wit…

Hey, wait a minute. Just what are you trying to say here? That business and technical people do better working together than ignoring each other? Next you'll tell me business people are human beings and not drones some cruel hacker made to torment other hackers.

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

#79

Post by japherwocky »

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…

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well?

You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

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

#80

Post by nostrademons »

kenjackson wrote: post #74
nostrademons wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, "biasing your talent pool" doesn't mean that everyone in that talent pool sucks. There are certainly some very talented C#/.NET devs. The problem is that when you go to hire, you have very little information about just how badass a prospective dev is, unless you've worked with them before. So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. http://ww…

So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. That was probably true in 1995. But not today. Python has become the new Pascal/Java. Commonly the intro language in CS, so you have a lot of students who graduate using Python regardless of skill. If you said Haskell, then probably. Actually C++ maybe more then either, surprisingly.

That's quite possibly true. It's interesting, I went looking for data and found that Python is now "more popular" (according to one index) than C#:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

It seems that wasn't the case even a year ago, though.

Post reply on HN