For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. For dynamic ones, I would choose Laravel (a PHP framework). I'll give a rather unpopular opinion, but in the beginning, you don't need to become a master in PHP and know every function. The Laravel documentation will guide you step by step when you want to add authentication or create a simple feature for adding dynamic content. There are also plenty of community tutorials. If simplicity is important to you, I would advise against going the fullstack JS route. The Node.js environment or more specifically a framework like Next.js is very convoluted. You'll have to combine packages and functionalities yourself, and constantly changing versions will significantly complicate it.
Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
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Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#12For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. For dynamic ones, I would choose Laravel (a PHP framework). I'll give a rather unpopular opinion, but in the beginning, you don't need to become a master in PHP and know every function. The Laravel documentation will guide you step by step when you want to add authentication or create a simple feature for adding dynamic content. There are also plenty of commu…
What if you need javascript? What would you recommend in addition ti to laravel? Or is Laravel enough?
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#13For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. For dynamic ones, I would choose Laravel (a PHP framework). I'll give a rather unpopular opinion, but in the beginning, you don't need to become a master in PHP and know every function. The Laravel documentation will guide you step by step when you want to add authentication or create a simple feature for adding dynamic content. There are also plenty of commu…
> For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient.
Not if we are talking about productivity, as asked here. HTML is rather simple to learn, but can be annoying enough to write. And let's not start talking about CSS is for a beginner...
Using some flavor of markdown and convert it to html would be far more productive. There is enough software around for enabling people a fast start, and you have the option to still enhance it with html&css (probably javascript too?).
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#14Ruby on Rails if you are a beginner.
If you are experienced, Rails/Laravel but I'd loop Clojure in too.
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#15Hard to say. I go with DHH: the one that makes you happy. Since you won’t know maybe just pick something mainstream. But I am against nodejs because I find the NPM ecosystem, imports, TS setup and config etc. messy and time consuming versus literally anything else. For example Go, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, PHP are all reasonable.
Yet any one opinion is just that - one opinion. I find node easy and quick, and some of the ones in your easy list to be easy while others are time-consuming and odd. We're both right - it is all a question of what you are used to.
So for someone just starting out, I agree - just pick one. You'll learn it, it is will make sense, you will be productive, and because you only know one thing everything else will seem weird. If you keep doing things, you'll learn more and then things will seem less weird.
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#16For static content: no stack, just html and css, and serve from GitHub Pages. Maybe Wordpress or Squarespace if you want to do something dynamic. Anything beyond that and you will need to become a software engineer, or at least learn some programming and server ops.
You can also serve JS from github pages for dynamic sites. You just can't host a back-end server or data store.
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#17I'll still keep shilling Parse Server + Parse Dashboard for back end. It's open source, it plugs into MongoDB, which is very scalable for when the day comes to replace it with something else. It has things like auth, password reset, cloud functions, etc built in, and there's tutorials for email adapters. It does much of the things you can do on Firebase, but easier and cheaper.
Dealing with the DB is extremely easy too - it handles relations within databases, queries, and the UI of Parse Dashboard is simple like your regular online spreadsheets. It's very easy to normalize DBs and all that.
Old article I wrote on how to set it up in half an hour: https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-serve...
For front end, JS + jQuery + Bootstrap works fine for basic interactive experiences.
You probably don't need React level stuff unless you're building a social media site or similar. One of the advantages of React is that it's easy to communicate what's happening to team members without documentation, but this is unneeded if you're solo.
There's disadvantages though - you have to optimize things like all your JS files, and handle reloading from cache when you've updated a JS file. There's no "clean" or "modular" code; if you made a bar like the " new | threads | past ..." the top of this page, you use find and replace. But I have sites that run perfectly fine for years on this, without much issue in maintenance.
Another bonus with simple HTML+CSS+jQuery+Bootstrap is that you can also host it on some really cheap servers. Netlify is free at first, but it does not scale well to say, 10k visits/day.
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#18For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. For dynamic ones, I would choose Laravel (a PHP framework). I'll give a rather unpopular opinion, but in the beginning, you don't need to become a master in PHP and know every function. The Laravel documentation will guide you step by step when you want to add authentication or create a simple feature for adding dynamic content. There are also plenty of commu…
> For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. Not if we are talking about productivity, as asked here. HTML is rather simple to learn, but can be annoying enough to write. And let's not start talking about CSS is for a beginner... Using some flavor of markdown and convert it to html would be far more productive. There is enough software around for enabling people a fast start, and you have the option t…
I tried Hugo and Jekyll and such, but it felt out of flow, and I felt going through docs and setting up builds was more effort than just writing it in HTML. The true benefit of HTML IMO is being able to just save something in a plaintext editor and then open it right away.
These days you can probably just write whatever format you like and Claude or ChatGPT will convert it to HTML.
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#19FWIW, this was discussed a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40376391
Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?
#20For static pages, regular HTML and CSS will be sufficient. For dynamic ones, I would choose Laravel (a PHP framework). I'll give a rather unpopular opinion, but in the beginning, you don't need to become a master in PHP and know every function. The Laravel documentation will guide you step by step when you want to add authentication or create a simple feature for adding dynamic content. There are also plenty of commu…
What if you need javascript? What would you recommend in addition ti to laravel? Or is Laravel enough?
I would argue adding JavaScript on top of Laravel will make you slower. You can use Blade as the templating engine (or how JS people would call "Server Side Rendering" but which has been default for most full stack frameworks). Otherwise you need to create 2 additional interfaces, one for backend and one for frontend. And an additional layer of error handling.
I personally prefer Symfony over Laravel because of it's modularity and extensibility, but Laravel has the edge on getting started quickly and available SaaS features (such as billing modules and stuff).
If you need SPA-ish features, you could use htmx and if you need some on-site interactivity, I like Alpine.js.