Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

I had a look at a lot of the available headless CMS systems last year. Didn't fancy any of them as they just seemed like a UI for building a db schema essentially. So I just added the relevant tables for my content to my db and then it was trivial to add content management UI to react-admin and add react pages on the main website to show the content.

I run a side project podcatcher site https://jcasts.io. As I don't have a lot of spare time and this isn't making money, simple+cheap are important factors, so I stick with what I'm familiar with and only adopt new things when I have the need.

- Django

Enough said, really, it's a solid workhorse with a healthy ecosystem. The admin feature is very useful for simple backend data management. No other particular reason to pick this over Rails, Laravel etc other than my familiarity with Python and the framework.

- PostgreSQL

No issues here, works just fine. I use the full text search instead of a separate search indexer such as Elastic - it makes the deployment simpler and reduces overhead of serializing and syncing the search index and database. You can get good performance by paying attention to queries and indexing.

- Redis

Caching and queuing. I use rq [1] rather than Celery for running background tasks, it's less complex and generally easier to work with, especially if your needs are simple.

- HTMX and AlpineJS

SPAs can be a pain to build and maintain if you are a solo developer - it's almost like building two separate applications, and then you have to handle the integration of your backend API and frontend app. HTMX [2] lets me get 90% of the way there while still using plain Django views and templates, while still providing a smooth end-user experience. AlpineJS [3] is great for dealing with the more complex interactions where Javascript is really needed, but I still want some lightweight structure.

- Tailwind

I'm not a designer/CSS guru, so Tailwind is great for providing sensible defaults. Was a bit skeptical at first of maintaining long inline class names vs something like Bootstrap, but Tailwind turned out to be surprisingly productive.

- Dokku

Basically Heroku without the expense. Has a ton of features and buildpacks for managing single-node applications, from LetsEncrypt integration to database backups. As I run the whole thing on a single Digital Ocean droplet, this is perfect - not sure what the next step would be when/if I need to scale up to a multi-server setup.

- Ansible

For any server setup and routine maintenance stuff.

- Mailgun

Email sending. Still on free tier.

- Github Actions

CI/CD pipeline. Works fine, very few outages or issues, pretty easy to set up.

- [1] https://python-rq.org/

- [2] https://htmx.org

- [3] https://alpinejs.dev/

I think you've just described getkirby.com including the content folder naming.

I think you don't find many problems because you're using firebase and that's outsourcing a lot of problems you'd face if you weren't using it.

Many people don't want to be tied to a provider to this level (I think it's all about trade offs, not saying it is a good or bad thing).

In the stack you described, in my experience, it is a real headache to get a stable and realiable system where you need authentication, permissions, users management, a CMS, background jobs, input validation, migrations, internationalization, etc.

Ruby on rails, Laravel, Django, etc provide a clean, well documented and battle tested solution to all of this. The modern stack you describe, if not outsourcing all of this to a third party, it is pretty complicated and no one builds it the same way.

That's why people complain about these modern stacks being complicated, you're just not feeling it because of the trade offs you've made. (Good for you!).

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If you like the column heights aligned on /convert/appdetails.