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Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#22Is php ever used?
Laravel is indeed the thing I am learning next from PHP, and I love the Startup ecosystem (and working in one), so I guess I'm not the only one. Also, take into account different countries; I'm from Spain and the Rails ecosystem is really weak here.
"Use what you know" and "use what the people around you know" are at least pretty good answers to the question of what platform to use.
Joel Spolsky had some interesting things to say here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#23Is php ever used?
Mailchimp is 100% PHP.
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#24Is php ever used?
Yes. We use PHP and we love it! It has its, er, quirks from time to time, but allll that negative stuff that you're always reading about PHP doesn't really affect the bottom line: PHP is great at building websites and scalable web apps, warts and all.
(Edit: a few others in this thread are observing that most PHP-ers got their start in the early 2000's. To add another datapoint, that's true in my case as well. Active since 1998, I started with perl, got familiar with PHP, moved on to MS tech for a few years, then became a RoR dev in ~2005-07. Eventually I got frustrated with Rails' performance, decided to refactor an app in PHP and was blown away by the two-orders-of-magnitude performance difference at the time. I've stuck with PHP since then, though I still play with Node and Python. All great tools. I hate the language wars, use whatever works for you.)
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#25I wouldn't assume there is a "YC tech stack". From individual blog posts I've read there is great diversity among YC companies' tech stacks. I also wouldn't assume that rails + angular is, or is even considered to be, the cutting edge of web stacks.
Maybe. On the other hand, Paul Graham has strong views on what great hackers are like, which are likely to color his evaluations of candidate companies. It would be surprising to see a YC company running an Azure/Windows/C#/Visual Studio/TFS stack. And there are good reasons why someone might do so. http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
I believe Loopt was on C# stack and its founder is currently leading YC, so I'm sure Paul didn't take stack too seriously when evaluating companies. There are a lot of good reasons to use Microsoft stack, and I suspect more than a handful YC companies use it.
Paul said it is advisable to not use enterprise technologies if you're willing to attract high quality engineers only. He never said it can't be done and it is never implied that high quality small number of workforce is important to every business. If you're in consulting, for example, you'd want a larger workforce you can get for cheap. But I think you already mentioned that point, just throwing it out there.
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#26Here's a broader look at tech stacks used by startups on Angel List: http://codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-ex...
Love this bit: The likelihood that PHP is being used is strongly anti-correlated with company quality.
But...
Correlation != Causation.
I think the causal effect works more like this: People in the startup scene (and particularly in SV) are unlikely to pick PHP as the language of their choice -> Not many PHP companies started by experienced entrepreneurs -> Lower quality.
The fact that PHP is correlated with lower startup quality (whatever that means) has probably nothing to do with PHP itself. If you forced all the smart people to use PHP, their companies would probably work out just as well.
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#27Here's a broader look at tech stacks used by startups on Angel List: http://codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-ex...
Love this bit: The likelihood that PHP is being used is strongly anti-correlated with company quality.
Unless you're Automattic (Wordpress.com). Or Acquia (Drupal).
"Acquia… today announced that its co-founder Dries Buytaert was named CTO of the Year at the 2014 MassTLC Leadership Awards, hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Acquia led all companies with four finalists at this year’s awards…" [1]
Those examples show that PHP can be used, in a core way, by great technology companies.
[1] http://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/dries...
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#28Interesting that bootstrap is negatively correlated with success.
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#29Is php ever used?
As an anecdote - in my circles I observe that PHP is very popular among people who started working in web ~2000, while ruby is popular among those who started in ~2007. Nothing to do with seniority etc, I think it's simply the default choice of whatever was in vogue at the time when the person started hacking, and by now many PHP guys skew older and are out of the startup game (i.e. working in established companies o…
I started out with PHP in ~2000 as that's what people used, but then migrated over to Python around 2007 and web.py. Now I've experimented with node and Go, Java and Scala, but I prefer Python and Django. There's so much that Django gives you, it feels stupid not to use it. I haven't tried Ruby or Rails, I just don't feel like I need to.
It doesn't really matter what you use if it gets the job done.
Re: Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love this bit: The likelihood that PHP is being used is strongly anti-correlated with company quality.
But... Correlation != Causation. I think the causal effect works more like this: People in the startup scene (and particularly in SV) are unlikely to pick PHP as the language of their choice -> Not many PHP companies started by experienced entrepreneurs -> Lower quality. The fact that PHP is correlated with lower startup quality (whatever that means) has probably nothing to do with PHP itself. If you forced all the s…
I was with you until the last line. Forcing really smart people to take a project in a direction they are fundamentally opposed to is suboptimal, at least.