Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

[jonathan-kosgei]

I've always been impressed by Discord's engineering culture and think they made most of the right decisions regarding their tech stack.

What other startups got their tech stack right?

[ayushgp]

Zerodha. They are the biggest stock broker in India with a team of less than 40 people. Check out their tech blog for their tech philosophy: https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/

Also, WhatsApp with their choice of Erlang. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...

[atmosx → ayushgp]

The zerodha post is ... hard to believe. Self managed _everything_ and one devops engineer, no SREs? Who's managing the self-hosted PostgreSQL instances with the hundreds of billions or rows of _financial_ data?

[dominotw]

Early 2010 startups like github, groupon, shopify, gitlab for using Ruby on Rails to get off the ground and scale.

[dpeck]

WhatsApp. Rick Reed’s “That’s Billion with a B” presentation is a good glimpse into their own view of it https://youtu.be/c12cYAUTXXs

[giraffe_lady]

Slack using php.

Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

[infamouscow → giraffe_lady]

A lot can be said for having an engineering team with the experience and maturity to recognize both strengths and weaknesses of their technology choices.

[actually_a_dog → giraffe_lady]

What were their reasons?

[giraffe_lady → actually_a_dog]

They wrote a blog post about it but it's been a few years since I read it. IIRC it centered on the inherently stateless request model and how that interacts with the way they wanted to do concurrency.

[kephasp → actually_a_dog]

https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/