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

Otherwise, https://dokku.com has been really stable to launch your own heroku on cloud services like Digital Ocean or AWS

Gives the same experience as Heroku but with more flexibility

I used to pirate everything, but is it a solution? In the past perhaps, I wanted to use expensive software, I was experimenting, didn't have the means to buy a license, and there weren't many alternatives to mainstream software, either proprietary or free. But nowadays things has changed for the better, so I try to build my workflow around what I can afford.

On a tangent, in my opinion, the advent of crazy cloud subscriptions have stimulated the community to find alternatives and promote more sustainable software. GIMP or Blender wouldn't be what they are today if everyone kept easy pirating Photoshop or Maya for example.

To op, if SOLIDWORKS is draining your pockets look at these alternatives[1], it's not my field, I can't say anything about them.

[1] https://expertratings.net/solidworks-for-free-and-alternativ...

The sofware focus on automating tasks other systems don't, document decisions and an extremelly tight link between the budget and the real and projected expenses.

Construction is a very local dependent business so good systems from other countries didn't adapt really well here. Hence the effort to make our own. I am the solo dev.

Stack is

* Backend: Quarkus.io , Lombok and Java

* Frontend: React, Ant Design and Typescript

* Persistentency: Postgres

* Automatic Backup: S3 and custom Postgres container

* Platform: Civo and K3s for PROO

* Security: Keycloak

* CI/CD: Github actions and Cloudflare pages

* Local Env: Docker for local.

* Ide:IntelliJ

Why did I Chose it: * Java and Quarkus: because I have 20 years of experience with Java, it's rock solid, performance is great and I am fast with it.

* Civo and K3s: Because I love k8s but it's too expensive to run for my operation.

* Postgres: It's just great.

* React and Ant Design: I like React approach, I have used Angular and Backbone before and react is awy better. Ant Design is just awesome, great looking components and they work 99% of the time, documentation is also very good.

* Keycloack: because makes me faster, implementing security by your self is always a bad idea unless you are a pro, which I am not. Keycloak let's me focus on the business.

* Github actions: Simple, powerful, free!

* Cloudflare pages: Simple, powerful, free!

Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?

Not there yet, let's talk in 3 years. But we are using the system at my company already and locally it's been a great sucess, improved our work by a mile, people are happy using it even with some bugs, we are already saving money and identifying places where we didn't have a good budget to improve next time. We also are not afraid of people leaving anymore, since with the system their replacements can pickup where they left and continue to work on Day 1 and buy stuff maintaining the time requirements, that was the best part.

I've tried many alternatives but every time things are just slower to dev.

This stack has a great balance between integration and flexibility. The only things that matches the django ecosystem is the rail/symfony ones, but ruby and php outside the web are limited. Js has diversity but integration is seriously lacking. Anything else is too low level which is not a good cost/benefit ratio for me.

Vite, vue and tailwind makes front dev fun again, postgres and redis can deal with everything without tuning up to millions of users and ubuntu and git are just easier to find tutorials for.

The impact is huge as I can actually focus on my value proposition for my client. They can ask me to add a cms, a weird service auth or some messed up ftp pdf generation workflow and I can leverage existing libs 80% of the way, with just enough custom to charge premium.

I end up twice faster, 3 times cheapers than my competition and yet my hour billing is very good and my stress at sea level.

Front end: plain JavaScript

Back end: Node.js

Host: $10 DigitalOcean droplet

Web server: Nginx

SSL: Let's Encrypt with certbot

Proxy: Cloudflare

Database: Postgres

Caching: Redis

Indexing: MeiliSearch

I wanted to learn JavaScript and understand the fundamentals, so I used vanilla JavaScript for the front end without any framework (React, Vue, etc).

Initially, the comparison engine was slow, so I learnt about indexing and added MeiliSearch to the stack.

I try to keep it as simple as possible and only add what I need.

I plan on migrating to Next.js eventually - not because I need to, but because I think it will be a good learning experience. However, that's not my priority right now, and is probably an excuse for marketing/content procrastination!