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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

#51

Post by davidivadavid »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #26
jitl wrote: post #14

If you actually want generalist web dev skills applicable to almost any web startup, learn Rails. There are tons of resources, and the Rails 1st party docs are a good starting point. Rails will set you up to learn SQL modeling, MVC pattern, CRUD basics, api design, etc without putting you into library selection paralysis which happens quite a bit in the JavaScript ecosystem, and you can replicate the architecture eas…

I agree with this - I did udacity's original cs101 ( http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs101/ ), then cs253 on web apps, taught by Steve huffman, the co-founder of reddit. Then when my co-founder and I decided to work on our first startup, we decided Rails was the best option for noobs like us, and it probably took us just a few weeks to learn the basics of rails because we'd already completed cs253, I think it might…

As a dilettante Rails amateur, I can also vouch for Rails in general compared to JS-based stacks. Having tried React ('cause it's trendy), I still feel like it's nowhere near Rails to create simple CRUD apps.

Thanks for the SQL recommendation — that's something I've personally struggled with in trying to move up from noob to intermediate.

Modelling things properly seems to be one step on the ladder that the Rails doc won't cover in sufficient depth, even though the tool provides simple ways of doing the task once you understand what you're doing.

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

#52

Post by gremlinsinc »

jitl wrote: post #14

If you actually want generalist web dev skills applicable to almost any web startup, learn Rails. There are tons of resources, and the Rails 1st party docs are a good starting point. Rails will set you up to learn SQL modeling, MVC pattern, CRUD basics, api design, etc without putting you into library selection paralysis which happens quite a bit in the JavaScript ecosystem, and you can replicate the architecture eas…

I'd agree with this idea, but Rails isn't the only game in town. Laravel has huge market share, and livewire + alpinejs is an awesome stack.

But there's also django if python is more your style. I like rails, just saying for quick projects I'd advise people to look into each of the 3 big frameworks (laravel, django, rails), maybe try out a demo of each and code a little to see which you like better.

Laravel's new jetstream starter is amazing as it creates an entire SaaS app in a few commands. Compared with Rails where devise/authentication is a diy solution, sure it's pretty straight forward, but having auth at it's core gives laravel a leg up over rails. Also caching, queues, mail, there's a lot of niceties built into laravel that rails needs 3rd party packages for, albeit there's also tons of laravel packages.

I recommend packalyst.org or larablocks.com to discover the best packages to use and that are currently being supported.

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

#53

Post by weedpeg »

I think I am qualified to answer this question. When I started my own company (running for 3 years now), I was already writing code for 5 years but that was not web stuff. I was mostly writing wireless communication protocol(firmware). Then i decided to build a SaaS product. I started with Django and i would recommend that to anyone simply because it comes batteries included. The documentation and whole ecosystem of django/python is great. Also it is used by many large companies in production so you can go a long long way with django itself.

For apps i would recommend Flutter. It's great, one code base for ios/android. Compared to react, i think flutter is easier as you dont have to deal with CSS/HTML etc.

Regarding hosting, start with heroku. It's super easy, does the right things for you out of the box. Security of something you need to do right from day 0 and with doing AWS/GCP yourself, you may be better off getting heroku to take care of this for you instead of doing yourself.

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

#54

Post by yowlingcat »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #44
yowlingcat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it.

With AWS although you have to pay the premium on egress, you don't pay that until you leave their sandbox; what's more, you can add links into your VPC that sidestep it. If you're just running open source software or a kubes cluster on commodity boxes and you're fine owning all of your operational burden, sure. Use whatever you like. But if you want reliability and good DX, your options get narrower.

Personally, I think that AWS Code Suite and VS/Azure spaces (and GitHub spaces by proxy) are going to be the real challengers in this space. There is a real UX problem to solve but it doesn't mean I want to necessarily use a different platform.

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

#55

Post by AlchemistCamp »

yowlingcat wrote: post #54
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it. With AWS although you have to pay the premium on e…

We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now.

If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.

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

#56

Post by yowlingcat »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #55
yowlingcat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it. With AWS although you have to pay the premium on e…

We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now. If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.

Look, I'm not saying I doubt that. If the tool fits your needs, more power to you. But that won't be the case for everyone. Eventually, some firms need to reach for the power tools that AWS has, or simply the reach in terms of reliability. Things like SQS, Aurora, Sagemaker, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, Redshift, S3, Glacier, Lambda, Fargate, availability zone reach, raw EC2 + EBS.

It's about ecosystems. Heroku has a decent ecosystem, but nowhere near AWS or Azure. I find it far more likely that AWS and/or Azure will improve their ecosystems to attain parity with the gold standard Heroku (or Render for you) DX in the small but which can scale all the way up. But you may find that a tall tale, and if so I would understand. The track record on the AWS/Azure side isn't great. But the latter did acquire GitHub, and I fully expect them to exploit that. I would be surprised if AWS lets them 1-up their incumbency through that vector without neutralizing it.

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