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Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

thomasbandt.com

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Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#11

Post by Existenceblinks »

threeseed wrote: post #7
human wrote: post #4

I applaude you for keeping things simple, not over-engineering, and resisting the urge to use the latest tech.

> resisting the urge to use the latest tech They are using React, Tailwind, Typescript, Docker, FP etc. which is what you would find in many modern tech stacks. That's what I love about this "we should only use old tech" argument. There is no specifics, justification or technical basis for any of it. So you end up wondering how old should my choices be in order to satisfy the crowd.

Yeah, each of that requires extra cli/config/setup instead of just `import` libs. It's not about old or new, it's simple vs unnecessary deps (imply complexity).

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#12

Post by imron »

leetrout wrote: post #9
personjerry wrote: post #6

Speaking of marketing, he probably could've plugged his product at some point in that article and leveraged the inbound traffic

Seemed like he was scared to share the idea.

Or maybe he wanted to write about the tech he used rather than write a prolonged ad for his product.

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#13

Post by once_inc »

threeseed wrote: post #8
schemescape wrote: post #3

Looks like he’s storing data in the server’s file system, but I see no mention of backups. Hopefully there’s more than one copy of the data somewhere (or it’s not critical data)!

Also the problem everyone makes with backups is that they don't regularly test them. At which point storing the files on S3 would have been far easier, quicker and safer.

"Nobody wants to backup, everybody wants to restore."

This very much. For backups, the great crunchtime isn't when you set up the backups and see them appear where you want them. Crunchtime is when your system is in turmoil, and you need to recover what you've lost.

I've seen so many people claim their backups are in perfect order, only to lose data because something broke between setup and recovery.

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#14

Post by scarface74 »

First for context, I’m far from a Microsoft hater. I spent 22 years exclusively in the MS ecosystem. I love C# and even now I’m the go to person when it comes to implementing MS solutions on AWS for my department.

That being said, when I was a dev lead, the first things I thought about when choosing a technology were the ecosystem and the how hard it would be to find competent devs. You can throw a rock and find a good enough enterprise C# dev in any major city. I would not have chosen F#.

As far as Flutter, Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and I wouldn’t tie my horse to any platform with a Google specific language or runtime.

Even Google is moving away from Flutter for internal apps.

https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

I’m very much a native framework snob. But I understand the need to have a cross platform mobile platform for a bootstrapped company. Why not use a JavaScript based mobile platform? He already new TypeScript and Typescript devs are a dime a dozen.

Finally, why use Docker for Postgres?

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#15

Post by scarface74 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #10

I'd say this is quite biased, which is fine I guess, we all have our biases. Seems his choice of F# is set in stone, so you either go with Bolero or you have 1+1 languages in your stack. This is also reflected in his choice of Xamarin: he "doesn't like" Dart as a language, so he's forced to choose "dotnet MAUI as a platform [which] might not be as mature and capable as Flutter even today". Flutter as well "suffers fr…

I would never choose a Google specific cross platform environment. A cross platform mobile environment constantly needs updating to stay consistent with the vendor’s platform. I wouldn’t trust Google to give that much attention to Flutter especially seeing they are moving away from it internally for iOS development.

https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#16

Post by scarface74 »

davnn wrote: post #5

Old-school monolith architecture with not-so-boring technology. I went the same path for a project, but in hindsight I would chose popular, well maintained, not necessarily boring, technology and a cloud architecture for most use cases I can think of.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS in Professional Services. I specialize in “application modernization”. Basically that means a focus on serverless technology.

That being said, if someone who doesn’t know “cloud” and has a deadline just to get something done like the author asked for advice, even I would suggest they just throw a monolith on a VM.

If they really wanted the optionality to go all in on AWS later, I would suggest AWS Lightsail - a simple fixed cost VPS that is easy to upgrade to full fledge AWS.

In other words, I agree with his choice of just using a VPS.

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#17

Post by davidatbu »

scarface74 wrote: post #14

First for context, I’m far from a Microsoft hater. I spent 22 years exclusively in the MS ecosystem. I love C# and even now I’m the go to person when it comes to implementing MS solutions on AWS for my department. That being said, when I was a dev lead, the first things I thought about when choosing a technology were the ecosystem and the how hard it would be to find competent devs. You can throw a rock and find a go…

One advantage of using docker for everything is reproducibility. Your dev and prod environmentsncan be almost identical.

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#18

Post by ofrzeta »

scarface74 wrote: post #15
ofrzeta wrote: post #10

I'd say this is quite biased, which is fine I guess, we all have our biases. Seems his choice of F# is set in stone, so you either go with Bolero or you have 1+1 languages in your stack. This is also reflected in his choice of Xamarin: he "doesn't like" Dart as a language, so he's forced to choose "dotnet MAUI as a platform [which] might not be as mature and capable as Flutter even today". Flutter as well "suffers fr…

I would never choose a Google specific cross platform environment. A cross platform mobile environment constantly needs updating to stay consistent with the vendor’s platform. I wouldn’t trust Google to give that much attention to Flutter especially seeing they are moving away from it internally for iOS development. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

So .. what would you use?

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#19

Post by scarface74 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #18
scarface74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never choose a Google specific cross platform environment. A cross platform mobile environment constantly needs updating to stay consistent with the vendor’s platform. I wouldn’t trust Google to give that much attention to Flutter especially seeing they are moving away from it internally for iOS development. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

So .. what would you use?

Whichever JavaScript based mobile framework is the most popular. I’m not attuned to the mobile space. He said he already knew Typescript.

https://bashooka.com/coding/javascript-frameworks-for-cross-...

Re: Technology Choices for My SaaS in Retrospect

#20

Post by scarface74 »

davidatbu wrote: post #17
scarface74 wrote: post #14

First for context, I’m far from a Microsoft hater. I spent 22 years exclusively in the MS ecosystem. I love C# and even now I’m the go to person when it comes to implementing MS solutions on AWS for my department. That being said, when I was a dev lead, the first things I thought about when choosing a technology were the ecosystem and the how hard it would be to find competent devs. You can throw a rock and find a go…

One advantage of using docker for everything is reproducibility. Your dev and prod environmentsncan be almost identical.

Is it really that much easier than just installing the same version of Postgres and running SQL queries to create the schema/seed the data? You’re not going to be using the same data in production and dev.
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