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Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

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Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#181

Post by montenegrohugo »

I'm currently building namy.ai (AI domain name generator) solo, and here's my tech stack:

BACKEND:

- Python for the backend. Just a great, batteries included language that lets me do what I want fast and doesn't get in my way.

- Flask: a web framework for Python. There's Django too, but Django is no fun. Flask is small and exactly what I want.

- Pytorch: My DL framework of choice. Again, understandable, makes sense, and fastly iterable. No archaic nonsense (looking at you Tensorflow). Also of course pandas, numpy, scikit etc...

- Scrapy: pretty powerful scraping library

- PostgreSQL: classic

FRONTEND: I'm not a frontend guy, but it's a necessity, so I go with the simplest.

- Bootstrap: Lots of templates, easy to understand. I'm not entirely happy with it though; I wanted to try Tailwind.css for my next project

- Simple, custom Javascript. No complex frameworks. I barely understand JS; I don't want to use a framework until I feel comfortable with bare JS.

DEPLOYMENT & OTHERS:

- Heroku: a bit expensive but so simple. Removes all the hassle. I don't think deployment is fun, so Heroku is my friend.

- Google Analytics: I don't want a lot of analytics, and GA just works. I do want to move to a more privacy friendly choice.

- Uptimerobot for detecting problems. Simple, works, free.

With this tech stack I feel really comfortable, I can iterate on all layers, and I really do have fun developing on it. I can shoot out an MVP for most projects in a week.

Here's some stuff I've built with this:

https://www.namy.ai (still building it, especially improving the AI model right now)

https://www.hugomontenegro.com

https://www.remindy.me

My biggest gripe in this tech stack is bootstrap, but I think despite of that and me not being a frontend engineer I still managed to give the sites a bit of a non-generic flair.

Happy to answer any comments!

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#182

Post by soulchild37 »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #140

I dont run a company, but I am very pleased to see: * Many founders are using Digital Ocean or Linode or something similar/simple, and not complicated k8s/aws setups * Many founders are using boring but stable tech like python/django or rails or similar for the backend, and vanilla js for the frontend Looks like where it matters, ie, shipping something, most are using boring but stable tech instead of Fad-of-the-week

I don't get why you are being downvoted, I am happy to see similar phenomenons as well.

I am using similar stack for my own profitable web apps as well.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#183

Post by makeee »

gizdan wrote: post #117

On a similar note, has anyone used a pre-built "saas starter kit" or the like? If so, how is it going? Do you regret using it? Reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to write a new app from scratch but I'm getting demotivated having to implement things like users, organisations, and other things that is essentially just re-inventing the wheel.

I made https://divjoy.com, which was mentioned by the other commenter. I'm obviously biased, but I'd say about 95% of users I talk to say they feel it saved them significant time. Of the people that request a refund, the issue is generally that they aren't happy with the UI kit (I give them Bootstrap, Bulma, or Material UI, they want Tailwind instead) or the database integration (I give them Firestore, they really want something relational). So basically, boilerplates can save you time but make sure you're still using the appropriate tech given your project and pre-existing knowledge. Happy to answer any questions.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#184

Post by noahjk »

montenegrohugo wrote: post #181

I'm currently building namy.ai (AI domain name generator) solo, and here's my tech stack: BACKEND: - Python for the backend. Just a great, batteries included language that lets me do what I want fast and doesn't get in my way. - Flask: a web framework for Python. There's Django too, but Django is no fun. Flask is small and exactly what I want. - Pytorch: My DL framework of choice. Again, understandable, makes sense,…

I gave it a shot with a fairly uncommon prompt, I'd imagine, and while some of the suggestions were a bit funky, I liked what I saw when compared to more traditional options!

I like the visual flair you added... wouldn't have guessed it used bootstrap!

At first when I saw the footer, I assumed Hugo was the SSG

Also on your self-titled domain, your logo stretches past my viewport (iPhone mini)

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#185

Post by _n7kw »

themulticaster wrote: post #176
_n7kw wrote: post #60

I taught myself to program to build [redacted], a comparison website for phone contracts in the UK. Front end: plain JavaScript Back end: Node.js Host: $10 DigitalOcean droplet Web server: Nginx SSL: Let's Encrypt with certbot Proxy: Cloudflare Database: Postgres Caching: Redis Indexing: MeiliSearch I wanted to learn JavaScript and understand the fundamentals, so I used vanilla JavaScript for the front end without an…

Just so you know, on Firefox 92.0b7 the phone images won't load. Apparently the network request works fine, but when trying to view the image directly Firefox says that "The image cannot be displayed because it contains errors.".

Thanks, I couldn't reproduce it with the stable build but I did with 92.0b7. Seems to be related to avif images and a bug in libheif. Trying to fix now.

https://github.com/lynnandtonic/nestflix.fun/issues/65

https://github.com/strukturag/libheif/issues/477

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#186

Post by montenegrohugo »

noahjk wrote: post #184
montenegrohugo wrote: post #181

I'm currently building namy.ai (AI domain name generator) solo, and here's my tech stack: BACKEND: - Python for the backend. Just a great, batteries included language that lets me do what I want fast and doesn't get in my way. - Flask: a web framework for Python. There's Django too, but Django is no fun. Flask is small and exactly what I want. - Pytorch: My DL framework of choice. Again, understandable, makes sense,…

I gave it a shot with a fairly uncommon prompt, I'd imagine, and while some of the suggestions were a bit funky, I liked what I saw when compared to more traditional options! I like the visual flair you added... wouldn't have guessed it used bootstrap! At first when I saw the footer, I assumed Hugo was the SSG Also on your self-titled domain, your logo stretches past my viewport (iPhone mini)

Thanks!! Here's a few answers:

- AI Model is a bit primitive still, I've been focusing on building the frontend recently. Now that I'm somewhat happy with that (viewport errors notwithstanding ^^), I'm focusing on the data science part of it. I hope to have a _much_ better model deployed in 5-7 days.

- Thanks!

- I've gotten that from someone else too. I kind of like putting my signature there, but if it's confusing I might change it. Maybe I could use my full name?

- Thanks for notifying! I'll fix that asap

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#187

Post by CodesInChaos »

Shish2k wrote: post #89

I’m not a registered company, but a solo dev who creates things for joy and ends up getting paid for it. Legacy projects: Plain HTML frontend with minimal vanilla JS for small progressive enhancements, PHP (custom framework) backend, Postgres, deployed directly on rented bare metal hosts, Salt for configuration New projects: HyperApp JS frontend, Python (aiohttp) or Rust (warp) backends, Postgres, deployed in docker…

> I wonder if my bare-metal OS runs basically only sshd and docker, is there a better choice than Debian? It works fine, just seems overkill...

Fedora CoreOS is designed for container hosts, but I haven't used it.

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#188

Post by themulticaster »

Fornax96 wrote: post #179
themulticaster wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention that you have user-facing servers as well as storage servers. So do the user-facing servers act as reverse proxies for the storage servers, or do you simply serve a redirect? I'd expect that the file access patterns are power-law distributions, i.e. recently uploaded files are requested more often than older files. If that's the case, can you use this property for sharding by having hot and cold storage s…

> So do the user-facing servers act as reverse proxies for the storage servers, or do you simply serve a redirect? Yes, my user-facing servers are proxying the files to the users. > I'd expect that the file access patterns are power-law distributions Exactly. On each server I have a sorted slice in-memory which keeps track of how often files are being requested. The most popular files are cached and files which drop…

Thanks for satisfying my curiosity! Also, congrats on your success!

> Yes, my user-facing servers are proxying the files to the users.

I've never operated a service as large as yours, so take my question with a grain of salt: I'm wondering whether it would make sense to split off the actual file front-end servers from the user-facing servers (going for a redirect approach instead of proxying), since the requirements for serving the UI (low latency, low bandwidth) are so different from the file serving requirements (high bandwidth, but latency is not an issue). In theory, the traffic load from the files could negatively impact the UI latency leading to perceived sluggishness of the website. But perhaps that's not an issue in practice?

Since you mentioned elsewhere that you wanted to move to content delivery: What kind of content delivery do you have in mind? At the moment I can only think of either classic CDNs (but that's a few order of magnitudes larger) or ads (but that's an entirely different area).

Re: Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

#190

Post by throwthere »

ggregoire wrote: post #154

Lot of PostgreSQL but not a single commenter uses PostgREST. Curious if it's just because the tool isn't well known enough or if it's because it has some serious drawbacks? Or people don't like writing SQL?

I love sql and have tried Postgres and posgraphile. The idea is really attractive, having the datastore home ask the business logic. But it’s kind of a pain to maintain and make changes. Plus there’s not a huge ecosystem around it like django, ruby, Phoenix, next has. And then there’s the whole exit thing— it’s not popular enough to find cheap developers to maintain it.
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