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

HTMX for JS. Go (GORM, Gofiber) + Sqlite (w. Litestream for replication). Linode for hosting. Ansible for config/deploy.

Front-end: Typescript, Next.js, Styled Components

Back-end: Typescript, Node.js, Express, Socket.io, Express Audio/video: Mediasoup

Deployment: Github workflows, Docker

Analytics: GA, Mixpanel, Sentry

Hosting: A couple CPU-optimised droplets from Digital Ocean, Firebase

Next.js + Styled Components was a really good choice. When time is limited, reducing any silly roadblocks is really important.

Mediasoup is pretty raw when it comes to setting up basics of video conferencing but allows for a much higher level of customisability and optimising final operational cost. It was a world of pain initially (not many solid examples of how to use it) but worth it at the end.

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

Maybe not on success (reality will verify that in the coming months) but on avoiding any unnecessary failure on the way. I worked and interacted with startups in the past that would get excited and jump on using newest tech (the very first version of Swift or early version of React Native for example...) just to end up battling the unknowns after a couple weeks / months. I try to keep the product fun but keeping the tech stack boring and predictable.

Vanillajs for the frontend,

crystal for the backend,

postgres for the db,

fly.io for the app hosting,

Cloudinary for the CDN,

trello and Github issues for management.

IMO, simple vanillajs blows any other js framework out of the water in simplicity. Crystal is an amazing and very performant language for the backend. If you love ruby, you would love Crystal.

Legacy projects: Plain HTML frontend with minimal vanilla JS for small progressive enhancements, PHP (custom framework) backend, Postgres, deployed directly on rented bare metal hosts, Salt for configuration

New projects: HyperApp JS frontend, Python (aiohttp) or Rust (warp) backends, Postgres, deployed in docker containers on rented bare metal hosts, Ansible for configuration

Notes:

switched from salt-server to salt-ssh after there was a salt-server exploit which owned my whole fleet. Switched from salt-ssh to ansible-ssh after salt-ssh was broken on osx for 14 months (and counting…)

Backups done with each project having a cronjob dumping a snapshot into a folder, then SyncThing copies those onto a remote backup host, with the backup host configured to keep old versions of files

Debian stable for the hosts, language-specific images for containers. I wonder if my bare-metal OS runs basically only sshd and docker, is there a better choice than Debian? It works fine, just seems overkill...

Monitoring done with telegraf + influxdb. Previously I had grafana in front. Recently moved to influxdb 2.0 with built-in dashboards, which is ok, but grafana was better (more graph settings (influx doesn’t even do log-scale y axis??); more flexible alarming; graphing and alarming were integrated where influx has them separate) - considering putting grafana back even if it means re-creating all the dashboards and alarm rules for a second time...