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Your tech stack is not the product

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Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#31

Post by dilyevsky »

themitigating wrote: post #18
bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

"It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone" I think that depends on the colo honestly. What is so unreliable about a single EC2 instance in a zone?

The fact that under the ec2‘s hood it’s a massively complex infrastructure as opposed to most colos.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#32

Post by mrkurt »

arcturus17 wrote: post #23
themitigating wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone" I think that depends on the colo honestly. What is so unreliable about a single EC2 instance in a zone?

Yea I’m left scratching my head too. Is there really a difference in reliability between an EC2 instance and colocated hardware?

Yes. In my experience, it's substantial. 200 servers in colo == maybe 1 failure every 6 months. 200 EC2 instances, one per month.

These are different things, though. If you're using AWS, you would build to account for this.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#33

Post by mik3y »

pickledish wrote: post #15

I have to say I agree very much with his point, though not really the way he communicates it: > Let’s riff. I’ve had my “macho engineer” days, I’ve built that stuff. Take me deep, I’m ready. or > No; customers are not paying for, nor give a shit about, these things. Sorry. Just feels to me a bit condescending for no reason

(author here)

Fair feedback, thanks!

I wrote that with myself as the listener in mind -- I often need the reminder that is the post's title -- but I can see how the delivery would sound abrasive to another reader. Gave it a light edit.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#34

Post by habitue »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #16
habitue wrote: post #9

> customers are not paying for, nor give a shit about, these things. Yes, but they do give a shit if: - your product is slow, so they assume it's crap and leave your site - your product breaks, no one notices or fixes it - your product is bad, because your wrote it in a safe boring technology like cobol and therefore couldn't access the best developers. (exaggeration, but variations on this are true) My point isn't t…

> - your product is slow, so they assume it's crap and leave your site I don't think there any tech stack that will have any significant (or even just measurable) impact the speed of the product, for 99% of the startups. > - your product breaks, no one notices or fixes it This has nothing to do with the tech stack. You can setup monitoring, alarms and metrics for any tech stack. > - your product is bad, because your…

> your tech stack does not matter

> You will have problems if you have the worst tech stack

Cool, so we've established that I'm saying the tech stack matters. All of the problems above have to do with the tech stack. Yes performance is part of your tech stack. Yes, how easily you can monitor it and is part of your tech stack.

> 99% of startups won't be able to afford the best developers anyway. 99% of startups don't need the best developers. Average developers can make great products.

Here again, the tech stack matters. If you have known mediocre developers, you should pick a language like Java or Go because otherwise it's going to be a mess. If you have good developers, you should trust them to pick the technologies.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#35

Post by iLoveOncall »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

Staying online is one part of it, returning online after a failure is another, and there AWS will be simply incomparable to your single machine which will have burnt.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#37

Post by CuriousCosmic »

themitigating wrote: post #18
bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

"It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone" I think that depends on the colo honestly. What is so unreliable about a single EC2 instance in a zone?

US-East-1 is pretty famous for being unreliable. The other zones tend to be a lot more reliable in comparison.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#38

Post by hbrn »

neilv wrote: post #26

> If we pick exotic technology, it’ll be harder to hire (and we won’t ship as much product). If you need to do something that's not just generic CRUD app/site... picking an exotic technology that high-powered programmers love , might make it easier to hire. Compare: "We're building a gig economy app to clean gas station bathrooms, and we eat our own dogfood!" to: "We're USING RUST to build something (not a crypto sca…

Latter has a risk of attracting fanboys and detracting product engineers.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#39

Post by habibur »

neilv wrote: post #26

> If we pick exotic technology, it’ll be harder to hire (and we won’t ship as much product). If you need to do something that's not just generic CRUD app/site... picking an exotic technology that high-powered programmers love , might make it easier to hire. Compare: "We're building a gig economy app to clean gas station bathrooms, and we eat our own dogfood!" to: "We're USING RUST to build something (not a crypto sca…

Leave it upto what engineers want, and they will try to build a google scale thing to put it into their resume.
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