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Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

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51–60 of 98 posts

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#51
An under-appreciated advantage of single-devs is ease of refactoring.

In the time it takes a big team to schedule a pre-meeting for discussing changing a schema, solo-devs can whip through many huge cross-cutting refactors across their entire architecture without anyone complaining about broken merges.

Building a real, successful thing generally involves more time and more learning about the customer space than you expect at the outset. As a single dev, you have a massive advantage over big teams in your ability to make huge fast change in the architecture of your product.

Here's the controversial part of this: if you want to maximize your ability to make big changes, you want a strongly-typed codebase (for me that's TypeScript on the front-end and C# on the backend because of the quality of the refactoring tooling for it). There's no formal guarantee that strong typing will keep your code working across big refactorings, but in practice it just works. You focus on getting the inner loops right and the compiler and IDE takes care of the rest.

Yes, you can probably write the first iteration faster in a dynamically typed language, but when you start making those big changes that are your unfair competitive advantage against larger teams, the strong typing combined with modern IDE tooling capabilities means a working system remains a working system even as you treat it like completely malleable clay.

I'm also a fan of modular monoliths, again for ease of major refactoring (if you're not familiar with it, check out for example TurboRepo in the node.js space). You can organize an enormous amount of code well using this technique, including having things partitioned to hand off to other devs or multiple teams if you happen to eventually want to scale up from single dev to multi-dev.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#52
post #47
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I spent hours researching the right Markdown to HTML renderer. Writing HTML by hand would've been faster. There's dozens of these frameworks and none are perfect.

Or use something like strapdown and let the client handle rendering.

https://naereen.github.io/StrapDown.js/

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#53

The most productive stack is the one you already know. If you know Python choose a Python stack, if you know Java choose a Java stack. within the language you know choose the most used one or the most boring one who existed for more than 10 years.

This answer is such a cop-out. I know Rails very well, but I'm still a million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails. Sure, it took some time to learn Phoenix and get up to speed, but if I could go back I'd have made the switch much earlier. What is the advice here exactly: "never learn anything new"?

I don't offer advice, I answered a question and platitudes like "I'm million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails" makes my "cop-out" "a million times" better than anything you can answer.

If you're starting in 2024 and want/need to be productive right away, use what you already know.

Nobody said anything about "never learn anything new". If you have a job and other people are paying you, the expectation is to deliver, not to "learn this cool thing" and be in awe about you "journey of self discovery" while on the payroll. If you really believe you can learn a language, it's libs and frameworks "in a weekend" and forget that's just another humble brag nerds tend to tell others, then we don't even can proceed with this conversation.

Learning is good and needed, learning is hard and takes time. Respect it.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#54
post #50
post #33

Part of my stack selection process these days is considering how well LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude "know" the stack in question. Using libraries that have been around for a few years and have accumulated a lot of training data is a huge productivity boost here, because LLM tools can both write code that uses them and usefully explain and debug them when they go wrong. It's weird and a little uncomfortable to hav…

How do you go about determining the aptitude of a particular LLM with a particular stack? What does your evaluation look like?

"Vibes"

Seriously. The only way that works for me is to spend a bunch of time messing around with a model trying out different things.

I really want to have a more repeatable process for this. I've been tinkering with a way of setting up my own automated evals to run against different models but I'm a fair way off having something usable there.

For programming libraries I find that my assumptions usually hold: if a live set is widely used and has been around for a few years it's likely to get good results.

I picked the WTForm Python library recently for this reason.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#55
post #35

I really like React Create App on the front end with AWS API Gateway connected to AWS Lambdas. I use AWS Cognito for user login and AWS DynamoDB for my data store. Hosting is dirt cheap to start and scales well if your app takes off. The downside is that you're coupled to AWS.

The official RCA is deprecated. Is there a fork you recommend?

Take a look at Remix. Great DX. No vendor lockin.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer is such a cop-out. I know Rails very well, but I'm still a million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails. Sure, it took some time to learn Phoenix and get up to speed, but if I could go back I'd have made the switch much earlier. What is the advice here exactly: "never learn anything new"?

I agree with this sentiment. I know half a dozen or even a dozen programming languages (some more than others obviously) and my first project is almost always a web project. Not every language has a decent streamlined / full feature web framework (I really havent found one for Rust yet that has everything OOTB) so you have to build your own pieces (which I've done with CherryPy, though learning Django was a boost, im…

Have you tried Python.NET? (I am a co-maintainer) https://github.com/pythonnet/pythonnet

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#57
post #33

Part of my stack selection process these days is considering how well LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude "know" the stack in question. Using libraries that have been around for a few years and have accumulated a lot of training data is a huge productivity boost here, because LLM tools can both write code that uses them and usefully explain and debug them when they go wrong. It's weird and a little uncomfortable to hav…

Isn't this identical to a dev from five years ago saying "I picked X stack because of the community"?

ChatGPT learns from blog posts, forums, etc. If there's a vibrant and helpful community around a stack, ChatGPT has a lot to work with. If it's obscure, not so much.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#58
Rather than the stack as in programming languages, libraries, frameworks, to build applications you should probably focus on platforms - be it something like vercel or render or heroku, or a bit more low-level like aws lambda, pick some platform+stack that works well together and that relieves you from thinking about ops and deployment at all. It will prevent you from wasting time at running your app rather than coding features.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#59
post #57
post #33

Part of my stack selection process these days is considering how well LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude "know" the stack in question. Using libraries that have been around for a few years and have accumulated a lot of training data is a huge productivity boost here, because LLM tools can both write code that uses them and usefully explain and debug them when they go wrong. It's weird and a little uncomfortable to hav…

Isn't this identical to a dev from five years ago saying "I picked X stack because of the community"? ChatGPT learns from blog posts, forums, etc. If there's a vibrant and helpful community around a stack, ChatGPT has a lot to work with. If it's obscure, not so much.

It's similar to that, yes.

The difference is that I didn't use to rate that as one of my highest selection criteria, because if a new library was well designed and well documented enough I wouldn't feel the need for large amounts of community support.

Today if a new library is well designed and well documented I still might pick a more mature competitor purely for the LLM advantage.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#60
post #52
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent hours researching the right Markdown to HTML renderer. Writing HTML by hand would've been faster. There's dozens of these frameworks and none are perfect.

Or use something like strapdown and let the client handle rendering. https://naereen.github.io/StrapDown.js/

The strapdown website works surprisingly well with Javascript disabled & is less than 50KiB excluding images. It does take (just barely) perceptibly longer to load than a traditional site.

But I've generally seen sites using this strategy to be a lot more bloated and slow, so please be considerate of that if you can.

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