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Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

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Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#71

Post by kirso »

PedroBatista wrote: post #53
arrowsmith wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer is such a cop-out. I know Rails very well, but I'm still a million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails. Sure, it took some time to learn Phoenix and get up to speed, but if I could go back I'd have made the switch much earlier. What is the advice here exactly: "never learn anything new"?

I don't offer advice, I answered a question and platitudes like "I'm million times more productive in Phoenix than I ever was in Rails" makes my "cop-out" "a million times" better than anything you can answer. If you're starting in 2024 and want/need to be productive right away, use what you already know. Nobody said anything about "never learn anything new". If you have a job and other people are paying you, the exp…

I think thats exactly what the question is not though.

There are too many un-opinionated answers like this. What if I don't respectfully don't know any stack? (my case).

Thats what the initial question was about.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#72

Post by stavros »

kirso wrote: post #69
stavros wrote: post #36

It really depends on what you're building, but Django is still undefeated for 95% of the things a solo dev will want to create. Everyone here recommends React, but all the interactivity usually doesn't add business value, just complexity and slowness.

How is it compared to Rails? It seems like the world is just divided between server first or JS framework first depending on how much interactivity. In my case i just need some API calling, retrieving data, rendering it on the dashboard (just text, no graphs) and pushing some of the content to another API.

I haven't used Rails, but I assume the two are similar. Django is more popular, which probably means more of an ecosystem, but if you need a simple API, either will do.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#73

Post by muzani »

balder1991 wrote: post #43
muzani wrote: post #17

I'll still keep shilling Parse Server + Parse Dashboard for back end. It's open source, it plugs into MongoDB, which is very scalable for when the day comes to replace it with something else. It has things like auth, password reset, cloud functions, etc built in, and there's tutorials for email adapters. It does much of the things you can do on Firebase, but easier and cheaper. Dealing with the DB is extremely easy t…

I gotta say, back when I worked in an old company they built a service for a client using Parse Server that still works great today, although nowadays it is fully self hosted. It has its limitations, but it’s a good abstraction for simple use cases, and it handles a lot of traffic without problems.

What do you mean by fully self hosted? Not on heroku? On a physical server? Some confuse it with Parse, which ran on their PaaS, before it was open sourced.

I do like it as a middle "low code option" as opposed to the complex no code options like Wordpress or doing the whole stack to build something that might not even sell. Honestly, Firebase has caught up to it in development speed and documentation, but Firebase feels ironically less scalable.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#74

Post by muzani »

cweagans wrote: post #37
muzani wrote: post #17

I'll still keep shilling Parse Server + Parse Dashboard for back end. It's open source, it plugs into MongoDB, which is very scalable for when the day comes to replace it with something else. It has things like auth, password reset, cloud functions, etc built in, and there's tutorials for email adapters. It does much of the things you can do on Firebase, but easier and cheaper. Dealing with the DB is extremely easy t…

You might be interested in Pocketbase. Lots of overlap. It’s really good.

Oh, this is nice! Thanks for the recommendation!

On a glance, it looks like Pocket Base is easier and faster to set up but Parse Server might scale better, just because it's tied in with MongoDB by default. SQLite is an interesting choice, but 10k persistent real time connections is pretty much near the point where you should be hiring someone to scale it up.

Supporting Google login out of the box is a major plus, and the dashboard works great on mobile.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#77

Post by kirso »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #2

Without becoming a software engineer? None. Work for 1 hour a month in the developed world to make enough money to pay for, say, a month on https://wpengine.com/ , and get to working on the actual website, not its infra. Even Python will take someone starting from zero anywhere between 10-100 hours to fully grok. A phenomenal time investment if you have any professional interest at all in computers, but if you truly…

i.e. in professional capacity. Hence the criteria of "# of jobs" does not apply.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#78

Post by kirso »

cianuro_ wrote: post #14

Ruby on Rails if you are a beginner. If you are experienced, Rails/Laravel but I'd loop Clojure in too.

Doesn't Rails have like an insane learning curve? (I might be as well wrong) at at least compared to other frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: If you are starting in 2024, what is the most productive solo dev stack?

#80

Post by Glench »

kirso wrote: post #70
heluser wrote: post #68

It looks like the answers are heavily biased towards “my favorite tool”. And don’t take into account what’s actually asked. For a person who doesn’t want to become an swe (e.g. working on a specialized area at a big company) and who is a newcomer the answer is simple: JS, period. Take Next.js and try writing something using SO, chatGPT, articles and books. Treat html , css as “will learn on the go when I need somethi…

Can I just say, thank you? Some of the answers are exactly what I've been trying to avoid. My only goal is being able to build my own stuff, I don't really care about kubernetes or scaling. I don't anticipate to have 1m active users with concurrency. At the same time, I got a bit scared by React quite frankly and hence was only looking at Sveltekit. However you rightly pointed out, its still being shaped despite bein…

Reading your question, I think Svelte or SvelteKit is probably a good option like you said. It's basically just JS/HTML/CSS as normal but if you want interactive UI stuff it's very simple to add. At this point SvelteKit is totally stable, it's just not as popular as React so it doesn't have as much community / LLM support.
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