One of the warning signs that you're working for the wrong people is that some guy who writes zero lines of code is making architectural decisions. Don't be that guy.
Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#22IMO, build with what you know already. If you want to build an MVP fast, then use PHP. You can always rebuild to scale later. That's if you NEED to scale, and people actually like your product. The other argument is, maybe this is a good time for them to learn these new tools. Serious Question: Why are you going to die of annoyance if you are the product guy? As long as they can do what you want it to do, what's the…
As a programmer myself, I would actually prefer starting clean slate with something new (especially for a brand new project), like ruby, nodeJS. Of course, you can stay in your comfort zone with what you know (be it PHP or even .Net MVC C#), but in the long run, the cost of re-writing logic, pain of scale and transition to another platform is truly a buzz kill. I would rather get the code on the right platform first,…
How do you assess the "rightness" of the platform before you even know the order of magnitude of, say, traffic or concurrent users?
I would love to rewrite my engine if it means I have a thousand times more customers than when I started. I mean, it's a win-win bet I'm willing to take: win now because I know the tools by heart, win later because I'll be making a ton of money later on and I'll be reingeneering a system I know by heart - which is so much cooler than writing fibonaccis in a language I don't know.
Chances are you're going to rewrite it all anyway for a strategic pivot, so why bother now with problems that you don't even know will ever exist? Just pick your best tool and make the most of it - premature optimization is also a form of procrastination.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#23You're a product guy, stick to that, and leave the programmers to what they know.
Nothing wrong with PHP. Some pretty big stuff is built on PHP. Don't go around trying to be the trendy guy, you'll just piss off your programmer buddies, then you'll become the product guy with ideas and no programmers to execute those ideas.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#24You may want to watch this: http://www.webofstories.com/play/17152?o=SH
Don't use something because it's cool, use it when you're sure why you should.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#25I think you should stay with PHP, but you can introduce other sexy things like utilizing the cloud servces. Swapping Apache and mod_php with Nginx and PHP-FPM. Use NoSQL stores like Redis, and MongoDB. Take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3. Look at websockets and Chrome's Native Client. Think about resposive design, and mobile first approach. Design a REST-API, and allow for easy integration and data fetching with OAuth-authentcation. Think about building native mobile clients. There is so much to understand, and do these days that the language you use to goue things together isn't that important, and btw PHP is one of the best languages to glue things together.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#26You should use a LNMP stack instead -- swapping Apache for Nginx. And of course take advantage of PHP-FPM/APC.
You have no idea of their business, infrastructure, needs, etc.
You shouldn't advise one platform against the other.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#27"I am not a coder."
Yes, you're wrong. LAMP is excellent, and your co-founders chose it and continue to use it for a reason. If it's that important that you avoid LAMP, you need different co-founders because you clearly don't trust them, their skills and their judgement on the issue.
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#28Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’ve been trying for a year to pull myself away from C# and work more in Python yet I still gravitate back to C# for my “serious” projects). I don’t consider the “we have experience in this” argument as terribly valid (why ever move to something new if experience means that much to you).
More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success. Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders. Assuming you’ll be hiring junior programmers it makes a lot more sense for your experienced co-founders to learn something new then trying to teach your junior programmers something old.
(Look at any programming language that's fallen out of favor in the past and you'll see the salary of coders in that language goes up as the language's popularity goes down)
The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution (“cooler than php” is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#29Despite what I’ve read in other comments here I think you’re right. Programmers will always want to stick with what they’re familiar with because it’s easy (I’ve been trying for a year to pull myself away from C# and work more in Python yet I still gravitate back to C# for my “serious” projects). I don’t consider the “we have experience in this” argument as terribly valid (why ever move to something new if experience…
> More to the point if you’re starting a new company you have to plan for success.
PHP scales for Facebook-like success. It will handled whatever this guy wants to do with his MVP and beyond.
> Success means hiring more programmers and picking a language that’s fallen out of favor will inhibit every programmer who comes after your co-founders.
This sounds a lot like the "cool enough" argument in disguise ("fallen out of favour"?). Remember the founding coders can write garbage it any language. Code quality and the choice of language are not related, and code quality of a legacy code base is much more important for new developers coming on board.
> The problem you have is you, as an outsider, can see their problem but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to suggest a solution ("cooler than php" is not a good argument). If I were you I’d seek out PHP programmers who made the switch to either Rails or Python. Invite them to a lunch with your co-founders and let them talk through the issues. PHP has some significant advantages over Ruby and Python yet people are still gravitating away from it. Getting them in the room with people who are part of that movement is your best bet at convincing them
If the reasons for switching from PHP to Ruby or Python were so clear-cut that they could be explained over a coffee, then everyone would have made the switch. But the fact is they're not: it's largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. So if their preference is to use PHP, why try to convince them they're wrong when there is no definitive right?
Re: Ask HN: How can I convince my co-founders not to use a LAMP stack and should I?
#30IMO, build with what you know already. If you want to build an MVP fast, then use PHP. You can always rebuild to scale later. That's if you NEED to scale, and people actually like your product. The other argument is, maybe this is a good time for them to learn these new tools. Serious Question: Why are you going to die of annoyance if you are the product guy? As long as they can do what you want it to do, what's the…
Rebuilding to scale is a bad idea IMHO. The moment your app takes of you have just about everything on your mind, but not a clean slate rewrite in a different language. You'll need to scale and scale fast. So you'll be tacking on hot-fixes for stuff that breaks, features your customers want, ... And the more code you write, the less attractive it sounds to rewrite. I wouldn't try to convince the coders to use a langu…
I'd say the happy medium is a SOA design. If you separate out the critical modules into a separate service, a rebuild to scale isn't much more than a refactor to scale, which you are going to have to do at some point in time no matter what platform you build on.