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Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#61

Post by noonespecial »

vyrotek wrote: post #44
noonespecial wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact. It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

I'll have to agree with this... but its worth noting that there's a difference between ASP.Net WebForm and ASP.Net MVC. I'm a huge fan of .Net (in fact my startup runs on it) but I absolutely hate the 'magic' that WebForms does for you.

Too true. The debacles I've been involved in that caused me to post the above were all hastily constructed WebForm apps at their inception.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#62

Post by mkramlich »

Your endusers may not care. Not directly. But they'll care when your site has problems or is slow. This part, in turn, is heavily influenced by the quality of engineers you have behind the scenes, and the choices they make. The nature/quality of your engineers will be influenced by what kinds of technical choices are in place at the time you start trying to hire them on. As a general rule, for example, a LAMP stack is going to attract a different mix than a Microsoft stack would. Lisp will attract different than PHP. Therefore, tech does matter. Does it matter as much as making a product people want and are willing to pay for? Probably not as much. But if/when the time comes and you want your site to scale, or have lower problem rate, then your engineers and your tech are going to matter.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#63

Post by sokoloff »

andrewtbham wrote: post #49

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

Most places can take the few minutes of SQL blocking resulting from an index rebuild in standard edition.

I know we often jump towards 5 9 solutions, because it feels like the "Right Thing(TM)" to do, but you can afford a lot of episodes of few minutes of blocking for what enterprise edition will cost... (we do run enterprise edition on our needed-by-cash-register DBs)

I'm a big fan of MS-SQL, and would encourage people to think about the value of chasing that 4th nine of uptime. It doesn't make sense for most companies, IMO.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#64

Post by xpaulbettsx »

j_baker wrote: post #5

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view i…

"And more fun = easier."

That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to.

What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#65

Post by mkramlich »

The absolute number one bottleneck in software-based startups right now is the availability, interest and affordability of good software engineers. The number and quality of engineers you're going to be able to attract will be heavily influenced by your tech choices upfront. There are some engineers who are so desperate they'll say yes to anything. There are others who have lots of choices and get to pick which to say yes too. In general, you'd rather have the second kind. So yes, tech does matter. The exact shade of the color blue you use in some image somewhere? Probably not matter too much. Your tech mix? Hell yes.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#66

Post by xpaulbettsx »

mwdev wrote: post #9

I'm doing the same. I'll give a shout out to appharbor. They have made it insanely easy and cheap(as in free) to deploy a .net app. ...and here is a little secret that they may or may not want you to know...if you don't have the MS tools, it doesn't really matter. You don't even have to have windows. They build the code for you. You could used notepad to write an ASP.net app on their platform. Push. Test. Repeat.

Yep - and MonoDevelop will run ASP.NET just fine on any platform, or just use gVim and make

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#67

Post by mkramlich »

alnayyir wrote: post #35
hughesdan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.

>the talent pools are deep in each camp That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure. I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation p…

Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and the ratio of bad to good, is going to be much higher with Java than with Lisp.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#68

Post by Encosia »

andrewtbham wrote: post #49

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#69

Post by alnayyir »

mkramlich wrote: post #67
alnayyir wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the talent pools are deep in each camp That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure. I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation p…

Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and…

Moving from .NET to open source improved the quality of code and people I worked with.

A lot.

>rewrite the stack in java

A rewrite was a bad idea to begin with. They shot themselves twice in the same leg. GG guys.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#70

Post by tzs »

a5seo wrote: post #43

The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision. After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-he…

I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it.

It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.

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