
Ask HN: What is your favourite stack for small personal projects? - ScottAS
Small personal projects have very different requirements than full commercial applications. Ideally they are easy to get set-up in a weekend or two, are enjoyable to produce, require very little maintenance, and are easy on the wallet.<p>What are your favourite stacks for personal projects?
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mobiuscog
Java or Python (or occasionally C#).

Why do I need a 'stack' for a personal project ? Also, a weekend-or-two to
set-up ?!? If it takes longer than 30 minutes to get going, it's not going to
happen.

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borplk
As someone who is deep into fancy Javascript stuff (React/Redux/Webpack you
name it) at this point I would say PHP7!!

There is something special about being able to create a helloworld.php and
have it sit there up and running with reasonable performance without issues so
you can forget about it.

Wait until you outgrow it and then consider something else.

I regret wasting so much time (and trust me I'm no noob in this) setting up
boilerplate dev environments file watchers transpilers hot module reload nginx
reverse proxy server-side rendering server REST API layer client side routing
graceful reloading blah blah blah.

Drop a few php files under Apache and keep marching forward.

~~~
aminozuur
Preach brutha! I'm so sick of these developers who are addicted to endlessly
installing npm-packages without ever getting to the point of building
something usable.

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whostolemyhat
Usually React, using this boilerplate: [https://github.com/davezuko/react-
redux-starter-kit](https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit) which
has Webpack and testing already set up.

For APIs I either use Express if it's really small, or Django/Django Rest
Framework/Postgres if I want something with admin pages.

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soulchild37
Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL hosted on digitalocean. I have written a chef
cookbook that helps me configure basic server security and install
Rails/Nginx/PostgreSQL with just one command. The automated server setup took
around 15 minutes then I can deploy my app to it.

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krapp
I'm a dinosaur - I'm still partial to the venerable PHP, SQL, and Regular Old
Javascript.

Although I did teach myself how to develop in Hack through Vagrant on Windows,
and I kind of prefer Hack to PHP for the XHP extension alone.

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radix07
If you don't need a database or a dynamic interface, I have a personal site
running with Jekyll. It's static and cost a few cents a month to run on Amazon
S3 (until I actually get some traffic). Github Pages is also an option if you
are going this route.

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pmontra
Ruby or Ruby on Rails, because they're the ones I'm more proficient in. I did
very small projects in Node and Elixir and I would like to become better at
Elixir. But the time for personal projects is small so productivity is super
important.

In general pick the tools you're better at.

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rayalez
Django, HTML/SCSS/jQuery, Zurb Foundation,

Digital Ocean, PostgreSQL, nginx.

Pelican for static websites.

I'm really happy with this choice of tools.

Simple, powerful, elegant, extremely fast and productive, and is pure joy to
develop!

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emilburzo
Java (+ GWT for the web)

I recently found out about
[http://www.ninjaframework.org/](http://www.ninjaframework.org/) which makes
the process even faster.

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shakna
Coffeescript, Flask or Bottle, Heroku. Maybe Firebase if I need a database.

Or if I don't need anything dynamic, Hakyll (Pandoc integrated!), and GitLab
Pages (automatic CI deploy via any docker instance from git push).

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stevekemp
I tend to use Perl (generally via CGI::Application, but more recently with
Dancer / Mojolicious). For databases I use MySQL and Redis for caching.

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source99
How many people work on projects expecting them to only be small personal
projects vs the start of the next big thing?

~~~
krapp
I think most people with common sense and self-awareness can tell.

I certainly would be surprised if anything I ever worked on became the next
big anything, and I have more side projects and half-baked plans than I will
ever finish.

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singold
Python + django + postgresql

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randelramirez
asp.net mvc + EF + AngularJS + TypeScript + Bootstrap, I'm a .Net Developer.

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merchang
LAMP + Skelton boilerplate

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usgroup
Linode & Docker & bash & (Go v R v Python) & SQLite

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miguelrochefort
C#, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, Typescript.

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warriorkitty
Laravel + AngularJS + Heroku

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dhogan
Node.js

