Some of the suggestions in this thread are completely nuts. If you are building a traditional marketing website for a client, you're doing your client a disservice if you don't use a CMS or hosted platform like Wordpress, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify etc. You should be delivering something to them that it easy to maintain and document. If they need to get somebody in to help in 5 years, they shouldn't need to find a be full-stack web-app developer.
Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
41–50 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#42I use Django for basic sites and complex web-apps.
Some sites are dead simple, with an SQLite data store, and static content served directly. Some apps are running on AWS ECS, auto scaling up to hundreds of VMs in response to bursty workloads.
Generally though, I’m running docker compose for local development environments, and docker swarm in production. (Until autoscaling requires something like ECS)
Docker makes it easy to define everything in code. (A redis instance, worker instances vs web instances, db, etc)
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#43As you might know not one tool fits all, I still have strong preferences for the following. It helps me get going faster and get things done right first time and helps in ease of maintenance. Language: Typescript. Frontend Framework: Astrojs [1] or qwik [2] Frontend Library: React if it requires 3d and other frame-motion like animations, else will not use any frontend library or might throw solidjs if required for so…
A second vote for this being a great list. This fills in some gaps for libraries I didn't know existed, such as lucia.
I'm going to try out Astro!
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#44No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…
> remember Heroku f* everyone sideways Can you elaborate please? I hosted an API on heroku recently. I have no problem so far. Should I be concerned?
They used to have a free tier that they killed out of the blue [0]. The cautionary tale is that you cannot just trust these services, they might change the rules at any given time... You can however learn to deploy your own servers and manage your deployments with FOSS tools like the ones I reference.
0: https://help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/removal-of-heroku-free-prod...
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#45I use Django for basic sites and complex web-apps. Some sites are dead simple, with an SQLite data store, and static content served directly. Some apps are running on AWS ECS, auto scaling up to hundreds of VMs in response to bursty workloads. Generally though, I’m running docker compose for local development environments, and docker swarm in production. (Until autoscaling requires something like ECS) Docker makes it…
I'm also using Django for my clients and have built out a lot of code generation so that I can get off the ground faster. It's really a lovely framework for getting stuff done.
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#46I use Sytescope.com for all my clients. We build all their pages in a fraction of the time and if they feel like taking the wheel for updates, they are more than welcome to.
99% of the time there isn't this service can't do.
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#47No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…
> remember Heroku f* everyone sideways Can you elaborate please? I hosted an API on heroku recently. I have no problem so far. Should I be concerned?
no, Heroku is fine, as long as you have a basic understanding. If your service becomes a runaway hit, your heroku bill may get big, I assume that's what OP is referring to.
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#48If it’s static & can be edits to content that could easily render out as static (such as some reStructuredText files) I always reach for Soupault so I can create something super lightweight, bespoke for the job, but extendable with plugins & tools that don’t lock me into a specific system… it’s mostly just the composition of applications delivered by my package manager, piped thru stdin/stdout, & glued together with this tool. The last thing you need are tools that are complicated, inflexible, aren’t built to last a decade of low maintenance, & whose outputs or dependencies are hard to make something reproducible when just building a website.
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#49My go-to right now is Typescript, Nuxt ("Next.js for VueJS"), PrimeVue and Supabase. I'm using Vuetify (Material Design toolkit) for an SPA, but PrimeVue is nice for general websites. Nuxt provides SSR/SSG and lets me use a single framework for both sides. All of the above naturally have quirks to get used to. ;) If I write a backend, it's in Go. It has nice concurrency primitives that lets me structure code the way…
Postgres Firebase
Does not compute, aka what are you saying?
Re: Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?
#50No one in here is going to agree with me because I'm not cool, but I don't care, "I've seen it all!!" I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with ton…
I think you are basically correct: the answer is usually boring technology. That should be everybody's default, and you should have to demonstrate why that is inappropriate on a case-by-case basis. But you should have to demonstrate it to a very skeptical and knowledgeable audience, who will probably roll their eyes when you talk about all the advantages of whatever eight month old technology you are excited to use. If the argument relies on phrases like "look at how many stars it has on github", or "here's a blog post about how great it works", or "big companies use it ... on some brochure sites" then it should not pass the filter.