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Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

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Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#31

Post by yowlingcat »

ramraj07 wrote: post #17
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #13

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder. React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably m…

Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best bet. And you obviously need to be careful with using every service that company throws at you, but barring that they provide the most solid reliable suite of services you can hope for so you spend more time on logic and business after some initial time invest…

I dunno about that. AWS is useful at a certain point, but I must say, if I want to spin up a prototype that I need to get into production ASAP with no pre-existing infra, the first tool I reach for is Heroku. It's hard to beat how clean the UX is. Why? It's opinionated. I get an instance of an RDBMS and my service. It's really easy to install Heroku apps. It doesn't make me learn unrelated abstractions to do that, or fill my life with pointless noise and bullshit.

I will always appreciate AWS for how I can rely on it in production, but it definitely require a lot more verbosity and configuration than it needs to. I wish we would remember the product design lessons DHH taught us. Convention is preferable to configuration when possible for a reason. It reduces unnecessary complexity. It makes it easier for your brain to work with.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#32

Post by bob1029 »

0x008 wrote: post #9
mannymanman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious. Out of curiosity, what made this seem like satire? Don't want to give off that vibe in the future for serious posts

It’s because your Post contains a lot of meme-y buzzwords. But that’s not your failure, more a testament to tech news and articles posted these days.

This is hopefully the correct answer. In the tech community there are a lot of "shiny" buzzwords that can be very distracting to the larger concerns, and many developers (myself included) have developed large quantities disdain for them over the years.

For reference, when I see an otherwise "light" resume loaded up with a bunch of words like React, Node, Kubernetes, Docker, , etc., I typically have an adverse physiological reaction and quickly move onto the next resume. Most of us are looking for substance in our work - meaningful value added towards the business or hobby interest being pursued.

That said, I am not against those who pursue learning of various shiny technologies as a hobby in and of itself, but I would caution those who are seeking higher orders of achievement to focus most of their energy on the core problems they are hoping to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#33

Post by nsedlet »

I'd suggest Rails. You'll be able build a web app or an API. You'll learn about SQL. (Rails is a framework for web apps - which are generally useful to know about if you're not sure what you might do later). For deployment, I have had a great experience with Heroku, which is probably a bit easier than AWS. I'd suggest ignoring front-end frameworks like React for now - you can pick them up later, if your use case requires it. And you can probably get a decent MVP done without them. At the beginning you want to optimize for speed and simplicity, so that you can iterate quickly.

I agree w/others here that picking a good problem to solve is the MOST important (along with having a decent idea of how you might find customers) - and implementation/selection of technology less important. That said, when I was thinking of starting a company, I learned Rails first (I used DHH's Rails textbook)! For me, it was useful to learn web programming so that I could understand what web apps were even capable of doing. It's really helpful when you're picking a problem to work on to at least have a very vague general idea of how software might solve it! So for me at least, it helped inform & inspire our brainstorming/ideation discussions. And since we did end up using Rails to build our MVP, when my cofounders and I all quit our jobs to work full-time, we could start building right away.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#34

Post by coffeefirst »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #27
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #13

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder. React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably m…

Strong disagree on not learning AWS (or another cloud provider). I was partial to AWS even before I worked for them, but chances are you're going to run your startup in the cloud. For that, you should know at least the basics of the cloud you're going to use. I'm not saying learn CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, or any of the hardcore DevOps stuff you'll be interested in once you start to scale. But you need to know how s…

Alternatively, if I were starting a business tomorrow, I'd start out with Heroku or a normal VPS (Linode) depending on the budget and requirements, and only switch to AWS when it made economic sense to invest in that setup.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#35

Post by whoknew1122 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #34
whoknew1122 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree on not learning AWS (or another cloud provider). I was partial to AWS even before I worked for them, but chances are you're going to run your startup in the cloud. For that, you should know at least the basics of the cloud you're going to use. I'm not saying learn CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, or any of the hardcore DevOps stuff you'll be interested in once you start to scale. But you need to know how s…

Alternatively, if I were starting a business tomorrow, I'd start out with Heroku or a normal VPS (Linode) depending on the budget and requirements, and only switch to AWS when it made economic sense to invest in that setup.

This is a fair way to go about it. Really, my point is that you're likely to use the cloud.

And if you're running a small/solo shop, you really need to learn the basics of that cloud vendor before rolling out on the cloud platform. I see too many people roll things out on AWS without any knowledge of the platform whatsoever.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#37

Post by porknubbins »

thinkingkong wrote: post #25
ramraj07 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best bet. And you obviously need to be careful with using every service that company throws at you, but barring that they provide the most solid reliable suite of services you can hope for so you spend more time on logic and business after some initial time invest…

No AWS _is_ hard. It's hard. They're all hard. They require tons and tons of knowledge before understanding what to look at, how to use it, when to use it, etc. Everyone who thinks these systems are simple completely take for granted the years and years of knowledge they've acquired. Even in the form of shared vocabulary, AWS is insane. IAM is a whole other nightmare of complexity that is insanely powerful, but I wou…

I’ve found AWS services individually to be straightforward but the UI is full of unintuitive menus so you always end up having to google “how to x on AWS”. Also understanding how to make the services interact takes a fairly high level of networking knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#38

Post by wespiser_2018 »

mdifrgechd wrote: post #28

Others have mentioned it depends on what problem you are trying to solve, but it also depends on your past experience and what you are already bringing to the table. E.g. If you are a recent high school grad, more CS fundamentals might be valuable. If you have experience from another industry, maybe you want to focus more on what the technologies you are considering will unlock in that industry, and look to a co-foun…

I came here to say this: the domain is important here. Are trying to do web retail? then maybe you should just learn php and do Drupal. Are you trying to do a business that depends on some sort of data or analytics? Then python is probably the way to go. It all depends, and I would be very apprehensive to say "use X" without knowing the problem set.

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#39

Post by mraza007 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #13

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder. React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably m…

Do you suggest investing time in frameworks like Django or Rails

Re: Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

#40

Post by mraza007 »

This is a great question asked I just wanted to ask after reading most of the comments don’t we think starting with frameworks like react or vuejs since it would be easier to maintain the application since you can find many people who have JS skills compared to using Rails or Django

I’m just curious to know

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