Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your tech stack is not the product

hoho.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#91

Post by rektide »

This is true only because there is a huge wall between users & devs. Indeed: that's a safe bet for the foreseeable.

But over time, for some...

I strongly want to believe that malleable software will find a niche and grow it. Expert users are a sight to behold, even with the limited offerings we have about, be it IFTTT, Excel, apple/windows automation tools, or what-have you. If a system can actively work to onboard, to layer it's complexity, to make it's flows observable & hackable, there's a good chance we could start emerging new kinds of power users, could start onboarding more people into software & systems literacy, in a non-overwhelming & fun way.

The web has a hackability like this, that is joyous: writing a small userscript to tweak or rework a site to your own pleasure can be phenomally easy & fun, is a great way to get folls started with & enjoying computing.

Again, the advice here is good. Most people are not trying to strike at the roots of human-computing interaction.

But some folks should be, knowingly, with intent to make open, transparent, hackable software. Soft software. And in these cases, the stack matters enormously, is the truthful reality behind the obfuscating veil of interface. Efforts like Naked Objects are about more honest systems, and when we invite the user in, invite them to our level, bestow real power upon them, these invisible opinions implicit in our stack become much more the shape of the thing.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#92

Post by nichrisgger »

candiddevmike wrote: post #80
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

It's funny. I'm working, right now, on a modular SDK that is the "heart" of an iOS app that we've been developing for a couple of years. I've taken functionality that was distributed all over a 30-screen iOS app, and distilled it into a simple-to-use, platform-agnostic SDK. This gives us a "kernel" that drastically improves the flexibility, quality, performance, and aesthetics of the app. It's a thing of beauty. And…

And then you leave and everyone has to deal with your homegrown framework.

[dead]

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#93

Post by nichrisgger »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #88
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

It's funny. I'm working, right now, on a modular SDK that is the "heart" of an iOS app that we've been developing for a couple of years. I've taken functionality that was distributed all over a 30-screen iOS app, and distilled it into a simple-to-use, platform-agnostic SDK. This gives us a "kernel" that drastically improves the flexibility, quality, performance, and aesthetics of the app. It's a thing of beauty. And…

The reaction to the post was ... interesting ... I didn't make the post as any kind of complaint. It was a fairly simple statement of fact. I don't actually require any validation. I'm pretty comfortable with what I can (and can't) do. It's a closed-source app, and probably no one will ever see the source. I don't expect them to. I have plenty of other code that folks can look at, if they want. A lot of that code is…

[dead]

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#94

Post by limitedsupply »

pixl97 wrote: post #41
quanticle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares what your code looks like. Nobody cares what your architecture looks like. … until it breaks. Nobody cared how the FAA NOTAM database was implemented either, until it went down. Part of being a professional engineer is thinking about these things, so your users won't have to.

Yep, this here. I work with a product that sees a massive difference in use between the low end customers and the very highest end of customers. For the low end customers it doesn't matter what your architecture is at all. Could be a single small machine in a closet and it would suffice. For our large customers it matters 100%. They are doing throughput 4 to 5 orders of magnitude higher than our most basic customers…

The argument is that nobody cares if you use a single file with 10K LOC of outdated JavaScript code or a beautiful Rust library to compute whatever.

Of course customers care about performance - if your app is unusably slow it is going to be an issue.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#95

Post by bschwindHN »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

It's funny. I'm working, right now, on a modular SDK that is the "heart" of an iOS app that we've been developing for a couple of years. I've taken functionality that was distributed all over a 30-screen iOS app, and distilled it into a simple-to-use, platform-agnostic SDK. This gives us a "kernel" that drastically improves the flexibility, quality, performance, and aesthetics of the app. It's a thing of beauty. And…

Hey, if you write a blog post on this I'd totally read it! Are you writing something that exposes a C API so you can embed it on various platforms?

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#96

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bschwindHN wrote: post #95
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

It's funny. I'm working, right now, on a modular SDK that is the "heart" of an iOS app that we've been developing for a couple of years. I've taken functionality that was distributed all over a 30-screen iOS app, and distilled it into a simple-to-use, platform-agnostic SDK. This gives us a "kernel" that drastically improves the flexibility, quality, performance, and aesthetics of the app. It's a thing of beauty. And…

Hey, if you write a blog post on this I'd totally read it! Are you writing something that exposes a C API so you can embed it on various platforms?

I’ve written a bunch of stuff, over the years. Most can be found here[0]. I haven’t done much in a while, but I do want to get back to it. It’s just that my dance card has been a bit full.

The app has had a fairly long and winding trajectory. Most of the reason that it’s taken this long, is because the other stakeholders really didn’t know what they wanted, when we started, so the project kind of “accreted.” It’s really been a long prototype phase. Much better than an MVP, because we were free to make massive changes, whenever we wanted. It has a couple of backends, but they have been stable for years. Most of the thrashing has been on the UI.

The last few months, the functionality has stabilized to the point that I could factor out this SDK, and things will move very quickly, from here.

We’ll see what I can write, once I can come up for air.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#97

Post by yawnxyz »

Well, I just built and launched an HN-like headless forum system running on Sveltekit, Vercel and Airtable. There's not really any CI or microservices or anything cool. Of course it's not scalable. Is it secure? Probably not... All the account information is just stored on Airtable!

BUT this is a system I know, and inspecting and changing data is so easy on Airtable. Managing content is ultra fast. And no, the Airtable API is slow as mud and which is causing my project to be slow as mud. HOWEVER, I launched this version very quickly. Much quicker than doing it on Supabase or SQLite or whatever... because I'm a designer, and it's hard for me to get started on those platforms.

If this takes off, somehow, then I'll worry about scaling later. Right now I've got a product to launch (and sell)!

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#98

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> our very simple 20 machine colo center setup has been more reliable than our single region AWS setup.

What happens when there's an outage at the rack level where the 20 machines are?

Or when the whole colo is on fire? [0]

[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovh...

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#99

Post by themitigating »

karmakaze wrote: post #48
acdha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also a lot of selection bias: that region is the most popular and people remember hearing about problems a lot more than the people who were unaffected but didn’t say anything about it. I’ve had plenty of instances in us-east-1 for over a decade without downtime other than the 17 minutes in 2011 where they had a network routing issue which kept the entire region running but off of the internet. I never had th…

It's well known that us-east-1 (the very first) is a pet among AWS's cattle regions. It has failure modes that none of the other regions have.

"Well known"

That's not sufficient evidence

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#100

Post by ParetoOptimal »

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…

I've seen this happen with Haskell for web backends for instance.
Post reply on HN