Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

Rambling while I drink my coffee:

Tech stack: React + Nextjs (react-query, graphql-generate, typescript), Django (admin panel, celery for background tasks, channels, graphql), Postgres, Redis (for celery and websockets). Postgres in RDS with auto rotating secrets. Deploy as a Django as a Docker image on AWS. Access keys from Secrets Manager at runtime (this is your pre EKS setup). Deploy frontend app on Vercel. Use Stripes newest payments system for billings. Deploy everything via GitHub actions PRs and use Actions, including the new code and dependency checks.

Bam you’ve got a frontend with a busting cache, websockets for automatic updates, ability to do server side rendering, and all the content management systems from the Django admin panel you would have setup by hand with Express/Flask. You can choose to use any method of auth that Django provides or go with Auth0.

Using graphql-generate and Django Graphene you can auto generate your typescript SDK on your frontend. All you have to worry about now is your view code and your models structure.

Using celery and celery-beat will allow you to do long running or scheduled tasks. Connect it with Django channels and push updates from a celery worker to the frontend.

GitHub will keep it up to date and check for security errors with automatic pull requests.

Expansions on this architecture include: - switching to EKS (useful especially for secrets and scale) - Infra as code via Pulumi to switch to any K8s provider - Using RabbitMQ for more robust messages passing over simple Redis queue

I would encourage you to put the idea of building a startup aside and just learn / have fun building things with no business utility first.

1. It sounds like you're already really curious so you've got your number one skill taken care of. If you're looking for a curriculum, start with something you're interested in and find the fastest, tightest feedback loop. Basically you want to be able to make something that activates all the reward centres in your brain or build it in small increments so you stay engaged. That might be learning how to write 3d graphics, build a website, basic javascript, etc. Find the smallest piece and just learn that.

2. Don't worry about doing everything "the right way". The whole point here is to try something, get a feeling for it, and then figure out how to make it better, how to write it differently, etc. You're going to end up realizing that one persons "best practices" are better than other peoples "best practices" and where you can make trade-offs (no1 skill imo)

3. As far as things to learn, that list is never ending. Just learn whatever you need to accomplish your goal.

I agree with this - I did udacity's original cs101 (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs101/), then cs253 on web apps, taught by Steve huffman, the co-founder of reddit. Then when my co-founder and I decided to work on our first startup, we decided Rails was the best option for noobs like us, and it probably took us just a few weeks to learn the basics of rails because we'd already completed cs253, I think it might have been harder if we had tried to learn it straight away. But rails was enough for us to build a telemedicine web app, and it wasn't until around 6 months later when our view was starting to turn into a mass of jQuery spaghetti that we started to learn and apply react. jQuery is great for doing simple user interactions in the browser, but as you try and build more complicated functionality, react is a much better tool for the job.

I agree about staying away from mobile to start with if at all possible at the beginning.

No rush, but sometime after or while learning rails, definitely take a look at the book "beginning database design" by Claire Churcher. It's the best book I've ever seen to learn how to design your database schema for a sql database. But you don't need it until you've at least made a few web applications, and like my experience with react, the best time is when you are trying to figure out what format to store all your data, and finding it too complex - that book gives you a great way of thinking about the problem that simplifies things greatly.

Others have mentioned it depends on what problem you are trying to solve, but it also depends on your past experience and what you are already bringing to the table. E.g. If you are a recent high school grad, more CS fundamentals might be valuable. If you have experience from another industry, maybe you want to focus more on what the technologies you are considering will unlock in that industry, and look to a co-founder for some of the nitty gritty tech details. Where are you starting from?

Use glitch.me to build a personal website which will teach yourself how to code and will teach you not only the basics but also what is involved in basic web development. Focus on HTML and CSS.

Mobile apps have a higher barrier to entry and you should focus making your personal website responsive so that you can design for screens.

Add a blog to your personal website and when you have to learn something first learn it and then write it down. Learn JavaScript at this point to automate the creation of blog posts.

Once you believe you know enough to make a project that you can do make a prototype on https://glitch.me and move to the paid tier. Then name the project and buy a domain from google / AWS . Then learn about authentication.