Successful companies with a boring tech-stack: Pinboard
I was reading about Maciej, Pinboard's founder. Pinboard is easily a great inspiration for indie hackers. The UI of the site is simple and utilitarian at best. In the about page, Maciej writes that there is nothing interesting about the architecture or implementation of Pinboard and he considers that as a feature.
Link here: https://pinboard.in/about/
Any other examples of similar products?
I love and use Pinboard since the early days. ❤️
I honestly think so many things are over engineered these days.
Oh yeah, I would agree. Not to mention the technical debt over-engineering brings to a product.
I think the major take-away, and I've seen a number of startups jump the shark on this:
So for example, I talked to one company that uses Kotlin in K8s instead of their original Node/Express framework on Heroku. When I questioned them, it seems like they are building an inventory tool with a concurrency of 40. What I end up seeing is people miss basic code-refactoring and better software engineering over using something that's a bit over-engineered for their workload.
When pinboard was created, PHP was the "vanilla" option. I think that's changed to Rails, Django or Express - as each are fairly easy to get going and you may as well pick up the language you are familiar with, and spend the rest of your time driving business which should drive your feature development.
Facebook was on PHP for some time, and some things born out of Facebook like Phabricator are in PHP. Phabricator is pretty excellent software, and to be completely honest, once installed, it's like any other dev tool.
Facebook is still on PHP, though they have a version that they compile called hackPHP. I worked there 6 months ago.
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While this is true, I can tell you that recruiting for non-"hot" languages can be a lot more difficult. In my experience, desirable full time developers were significantly less interested in leaving their companies without the carrot of working with codebases that were considered an upgrade to them.
And just to be clear, I couldn't agree more that it's just silly. Standing up a Rails or Python app is loads easier than building some serverless / Go / Elm / etc. architecture just for the sake of it being "cool".
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Yeah, very good point. I think some of the issues we ran into were inherent to Rails as it didn't seem to have as many "lifers" as people tended to move on to other languages using it as a launching pad. PHP seems a bit different in that people stick with it. Could just have been unique to us and where we were looking though so who knows. In all fairness, we were trying to hire non-remote so the pool was pretty small to begin with.