HACKER Q&A
📣 ecmascript

Companies of one, what is your tech stack in 2023?


Hello dear HNers. Each year for the last few years (except last year, when it was asked by amitprasad) I have asked companies of one, meaning companies that consists of only one person of what tech stacks you use. Feel free to link to your site or project for show case if you want.

What is your tech stack?

Why did you choose it?

Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?

Here is the previous threads:

(2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960033

(2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299053

(2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25465582

(2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024041

Thanks in advance!

  👤 rozenmd Accepted Answer ✓
- What is your tech stack?

OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) is built with React + TailwindCSS on the frontend with Next.js, Node.js backend, GraphQL API, Postgres DB.

I also build AWS Lambda functions to support the main product in Node.js.

- Why did you choose it?

It's what I already knew, and used professionally for several years.

- Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?

No customer has ever asked me "What are you using to build OnlineOrNot?". What they have asked me is "Hey can you extend feature X to support use case Y?".

Building with technology I already knew meant I could respond "Hell yes", and have the feature deployed and released by the next morning (if it fit my roadmap, of course).

👤 lifechoseme123
What is your tech stack?

- NodeJS, ReactJS, Postgres, on Linux (via DigitalOcean)

- Booted with Terraform. Opened & traffic-secured with Nginx + Certbot

- Everything running in Docker

Why did you choose it?

- JS: To reduce context switching, and I have a high level of familiarity with it

- Terraform: To automate & speed up server experimentation

- Docker: To make the app easier to transport & access

Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?

(i think this question is not well formulated. "any impact"? anything & everything can have "any impact" because its "any" as in "anything". It's like asking "Does anything impact you?" "Uh, yes, I am alive. Everything I encounter and perceive impacts me.". Maybe formulate a more specific/less vague question)

👤 ezekg
Rails, Postgres, Redis. A little bit of Go. I chose Rails because it gives me a high development velocity, and because I love Ruby. I chose Go for a few things, such as the CLI, for its portability. I do think my choices have had an impact on my success. I'm able to build and release new features much faster than my competition. And fix bugs faster. I follow conventions, so things usually just flow. Some features I've built recently would have also been much harder to build in a language without metaprogramming.
👤 i_am_the_dwarf
Not a company of one, but honestly a great threat! Let me split it up between professional (lead of a small team (5 people working on different projects) that builds websites / apps for SME's) and personal (fun projects / potential businesses).

- Professionally:

Stacks: WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, NodeJS (TypeScript + Express / Svelte / React / Next).

Reasoning: WordPress is just the go-to for SME's, Laravel & Symfony for very custom or specific websites / apps, NodeJS for simple CRUD API's or when the customer has a high budget.

CI/CD: GitHub (+ GitHub actions).

Servers: Dedicated servers with CentOS or Ubuntu Server, managed manually.

Databases: MariaDB / MongoDB / Redis.

- Personally:

Stacks: NodeJS (TypeScript + Svelte), GoLang, or the language I want to learn.

CI/CD: GitHub (+ GitHub actions).

Servers: Hetzner shared aarch64 (price/performance is good), setup with Ansible, runs everything in Podman containers.

Databases: PostgreSQL / MongoDB.