
ASK HN: How would you do project planning for a YCombinator news clone? - Jgoure
I have started project planning a clone of ycombinator and I am running into a problem. This is my first large web app. The other web apps I have built we&#x27;re toy projects to learn API&#x27;s and frameworks.<p>I am going with a MVC design pattern. For this project I&#x27;ve set down for the first time and written out all of the features of the website. Then I began to document each models structure. I&#x27;ve written out all of the properties for the models. Next I will start designing the views.<p>The question I have is what kind of model structure would you use? I have 3 models the user, the submissions and the comments.<p>Each model seems so huge though.<p>I&#x27;ve studied iOS design and I feel that it would be easier and it makes more since to design and build things the way iOS apps work. For example, in an iOS app, if a user clicks on a submission in iOS, the submission detail view would be populated from the model data of the clicked submission.<p>However from my understanding of websites, building each site from the model data each time a link is clicked would be a huge waste of server resources. Also when web crawlers build links each site needs to be server side rendered. So the server must store 100s and 1000s of sites.<p>Can you please recommend any further reading on the subject of web app structure and project planning?
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mtmail
Less on the app structure, but more specific to hackernews: the source code is
open
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371189),
more pointers in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14371821)

The source code of [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/) is also open
source and from a feature point-of-view pretty similar.
[https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters)

> building each site from the model data each time a link is clicked would be
> a huge waste of server resources

It's typically still done. Forums are 90+% read, little write and caching the
rendering output gives a huge boost.

