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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

#41

Post by mr-ron »

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…

> At the beginning, the most important thing is speed.

Specifically, speed of development

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

#42

Post by mattcdrake »

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…

Do you have advice on learning AWS/cloud for people that don't know anything about it? I have a Django/React project I'm hacking on where everything runs locally, but I don't understand how to put this thing on the real internet.

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

#43

Post by wespiser_2018 »

Stay away from "blockchain" or "crypto"! First, the blockchain use cases are few and far between. Illegal "darknet" markets selling drugs are the biggest use case of the biggest blockchain, Bitcoin. Distributed blockchains just doesn't make sense for most computational problems, and "blockchain" becomes the solution not for technical, but for marketing or legal reasons.

Next, the strategies to make money off blockchains usually involve selling a mis-understood product to the next greater fool, and the blockchain industry has a really sketchy history of using pump and dump schemes to make money while leaving purchasers with useless products.

Finally, I believe there is now a shift in opinion against blockchain: After the huge investments of late 2018/2018, a number of well known folks in tech have spoken out against blockchain. Right now, there are still a lot of people holding the bag, so to speak, including a lot VCs from 2018. I believe, based on the performance of blockchain companies and new regulation, that there won't be many new blockchain/crypto companies, although you never know.

That said, the underlying technology that makes blockchain work is worth study in it's own right, and has industry applications: Distributed systems, databases, distributed consensus, cryptography, byzantine generals problem, et cetera.

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

#44

Post by AlchemistCamp »

yowlingcat wrote: post #31
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…

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…

The option I suggested, Render, is essentially the new Heroku. It's focused on dev experience, run by ex-Stripe people who worked on their infra and it's much less expensive than Heroku has been post-acquisition.

If you want something managed that requires minimal time worrying about infra, they're a great choice. For something that truly requires low costs per user, I wouldn't use them but they make a ton of sense for many projects.

And to be fair, AWS also has some serious limitations in terms of price scalability compared to a VPS like Digital Ocean or Linode: https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-...

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

#45

Post by whoknew1122 »

mattcdrake wrote: post #42
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…

Do you have advice on learning AWS/cloud for people that don't know anything about it? I have a Django/React project I'm hacking on where everything runs locally, but I don't understand how to put this thing on the real internet.

I suggest getting a subscription to ACloudGuru or Cloud Academy. I'm more partial to Cloud Academy these days. They're both about $50 a month.

Then go through the Certified Cloud Practitioner course. That will give you the very basics.

Once you're done with the CCP, you can move to the Solutions Architect Associate course. You don't have to get the certs (although they are useful). But the courses will give you a good understanding of AWS.

Just to be clear, that's about 50 hours of content. But I suggest being over-prepared rather than under-prepared.

acloudguru.com cloudacademy.com

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

#46

Post by osdev »

Focus on no-code, low-code approaches and tools to building a product to validate a problem and your solution to it.

For example, use a “no code” approach first and simply use tools to design or build a simple Product, from concept to creation. Use cloud services like Invision to create a prototype, website builders/template to validate need/interest in an idea. These are all things that anyone can pick up reasonably well without coding.

Essentially, what I’m saying is focus on non-technical skills related to ideation, proof of concept, product validation, etc.

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

#47

Post by ryanbrunner »

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…

If you're solo or intending to stay small, I'd strongly recommend just using a PaaS that works at a higher level of abstraction than AWS. Heroku is still around, will give you sane defaults without really knowing much about the devops world at all, and will scale well enough that you'll almost certainly have a much bigger team prior to needing to move to something more complex.

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

#48

Post by mattcdrake »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #45
mattcdrake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have advice on learning AWS/cloud for people that don't know anything about it? I have a Django/React project I'm hacking on where everything runs locally, but I don't understand how to put this thing on the real internet.

I suggest getting a subscription to ACloudGuru or Cloud Academy. I'm more partial to Cloud Academy these days. They're both about $50 a month. Then go through the Certified Cloud Practitioner course. That will give you the very basics. Once you're done with the CCP, you can move to the Solutions Architect Associate course. You don't have to get the certs (although they are useful). But the courses will give you a goo…

Very cool, I will check this out. Thanks!

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

#49

Post by chrisgoman »

If your goal is to create your own startup, the technology doesn't really matter. Unless your startup is a "mobile app", then that is also not important today. As with most suggestions here, your best bet is to start with web dev (like you have mentioned) but don't get sucked into the hype. You could do a lot with Rails or PHP (this gives you a solid understanding of some foundational stuff)

- Internet: Domain names + DNS + Hosting (VPS is enough)

- Web Dev + Backend: Nginx (web server) + PHP-FPM (PHP) OR Unicorn (Rails)

- Database: You will need SQL no matter what other people tell you

- Front end: HTML, CSS (Bootstrap), Javascript (jQuery)

These are the most "boring" things you can learn but you won't spend weeks just getting your environment going and you are already frustrated. All the cool stuff deals with async, PWA, SPA, NoSQL, (... insert more buzzwords here ...) that will just confuse you before you even get a login page up and running.

Your goal is to be able to create a functioning "web application" that may already exist so you can just "borrower" the features and not have to think too hard if learning coding and technology is where you are at right now.

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