
Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack? - ecmascript
This question has most likely been asked before, but since our industry moves fast I want to ask it still. You guys that roll your own operation, what is your business (no need to out yourselves) and what tech stack did you choose to complete it?<p>Also, if you don&#x27;t mind, do you think the tech you chose had any effects on your success? If it did, why?
======
metafunctor
Django, Python 3, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, uWSGI,
nginx, Celery, RabbitMQ, Ubuntu, Ansible, Sentry.io, Gitlab, Hetzner,
Cloudflare, Create React App.

Effects on success: I already knew this stack (no time lost learning new
tech), can run with a very tight budget (suitable for starting a business on
the side). And, obviously, this is a great stack that will scale far into the
future if needed.

~~~
elamje
Your tech stack is almost identical to Listennotes.com

[https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-
behi...](https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behind-
listen-notes-56697c2e347b)

------
idlewords
I run Pinboard. I have my own hardware running Ubuntu. The site itself runs
PHP+MySQL, with perl scripts for backend tasks. I make heavy use of Twitter to
talk about unrelated topics, and eventually people take pity and sign up for
the site, using either Stripe or PayPal.

~~~
j_crick
If only you would respond to emails with feature requests and bug reports, and
then do something about them.

~~~
idlewords
Indeed

------
speedplane
I started building my company back in the hey-day of PaaS, when Heroku, Google
App Engine, and to a lesser degree Amazon Elastic Beanstalk were all the rage.

When starting from nothing, these were incredible platforms. Features like the
OS, web server, memcache, taskqueues, databases, startup-scripts, emailing,
and auto-scaling were all built-in with almost no configuration.

The PaaS wave has pretty much come and gone. Now you need to think about and
choose your linux image. If you want memcache, setup your own Redis server.
For taskqueues, you need to master RabbitMQ. For email, sign up for Sendgrid
or another service. App Engine still exists, but they keep stripping features
from it, and push you to standalone services.

When you get very large, you'll likely need to migrate to these more tunable
services eventually, but when you're just starting out, it's a huge boost in
productivity to have these basic services available that just work for a large
majority of use-cases.

My guess is that most of the PaaS users were smaller companies / solos that
didn't have the bandwidth to manage all these services and also build their
app, and I suspect many operated in the free tier. Google probably recognized
they weren't making money in the space, and shifted gears to focus on larger
companies that required far more complex setups, and generated far more in
fees.

It's a shame there has been such a strong movement away from PaaS, it was far
easier in the past to get a fully functioning platform up and running than it
is today.

------
yakshaving_jgt
I just use the simplest and most boring things that work.

Most of my software is written in Haskell, with the Yesod framework handling
all the HTTP stuff. Data is mostly persisted in PostgreSQL, with some caching
and queueing stuff done in Redis. I try to avoid JavaScript if I can help it.
When I do need a richer UI, I'll add small bits of plain JavaScript, sometimes
with jQuery. When I need a more complex UI, I use Elm. Everything runs on
NixOS machines on AWS.

Not wrestling with constant runtime errors and not being afraid to make broad
sweeping changes means I can adapt the software to the business more quickly.

~~~
Peteris
Haskell is not boring.

~~~
stuxnet79
The post is tongue in cheek. Haskell for backend and NixOS for deployment ...
a rather exotic setup even by HN standards.

~~~
yakshaving_jgt
I don't see it that way.

I don't think relative obscurity makes the technology itself exciting. I
certainly didn't choose these technologies to be different, or to be
fashionable. If I wanted to play with shiny toys, there are so many others to
choose from. The shiny toys don't really appeal to me. I have businesses to
run, and the technologies I chose are from a position of total pragmatism.

I sincerely believe it's _easier_ to use Haskell and NixOS for applications of
beyond trivial scale than, say, Ruby and Ansible. And I say that from
experience.

------
jonny383
Back end PHP/CodeIgniter, Front end TypeScript (no libraries), DB MySQL, ML /
Scripts Python3, SCM git.

Database upgrades are stores in an upgrades/<version>/upgrade.sql format.
There can also be upgrades/<version>/upgrade.sh shell scripts.

For testing: back end is a bunch of single files run through a small, purpose
built wrapper. Front end uses Jest.

Git hooks run locally for pre-commit and releases. Deployment is handled
automatically by GitHub web hooks. The server handles any upgrade file
(upgrade.sql and / or upgrade.sh) as triggered by GitHub web hooks. General
rule of thumb here is never commit or push to master unless you're confident
everything is ready (this only really works for a single person!)

Application server runs on a single instance Debian VM on Azure. MySQL runs on
a separate VM instance on Azure, with a failover configured. There's also a
read-only MySQL replica which is used for pulling large amounts of reporting
data.

For backup (outside of that provided by Azure), there's a series of shell
scripts running on cron to dump the database to an encrypted and time stamped
backup. These are periodically fetched by other servers in different
locations. Backups are kept for every business hour of operation. For user
generated files (>1TB per year), rsync is run every hour on a couple of backup
machines. Backups are manually checked by a person (for completeness and
restorability) once per month. Automated backup checks are run daily on cron.

The longest down time that has been had in six years is fifteen minutes which
was due to a bad database upgrade.

------
almost
Web bits: Python 3 and Django with Celery running on Heroku. Postgres (source
of truth) and Redis (caching and queues). S3 for storage. Front end is HTML
and basic JavaScript. Pretty happy with it, it's really quick to make new
stuff in. Starting to consider adding types to some bits Python with mypy as
it's got to a size where types would be useful.

App: React Native with Redux. Flow for types (would use TypeScript if starting
again today). RN is a pain but seems better than the alternatives for what I
need.

That all allowed me to get a prototype together at the start and to iterate
very quickly which was essential for making the whole thing happen at all.
Some of that was the technology itself but a lot of it was just that I was
very familiar with it.

------
bdibs
My current venture ([https://www.podalong.com](https://www.podalong.com)) is
using Elixir/Phoenix Framework/Vue.js for the front end, a couple various
Golang services for background stuff, and Elasticsearch for search.

This was my first project using Elixir/Phoenix and it’s been really fantastic,
I couldn’t recommend it enough for being very productive and it’s fairly
performant to boot.

The mobile app was built using Flutter (again my first project with Flutter),
and it has honestly been great. I come from a Java background and Dart is
extremely similar so it took no time at all to get acclimated.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Very cool. How has the learning process been for you? Where did you start and
have there been any particularly challenging parts?

------
Doches
I run [https://quailhq.com](https://quailhq.com) \-- point-of-sale software
for antique stores.

\---

Data: Postgres

APIs: Java + Dropwizard

Frontend: Typescript, transitioning from Angular (1.x) to React

Hosting is on a cluster of cheap Linodes, and transactional email is handled
by Postmark. Shout out to both of those services, which have been rock-solid
compared to others I've tried. I absolutely think the choice of tech has
helped Quail succeed -- it's boring software built with boring technology,
which leaves me free to focus on the more interesting parts of the business.

~~~
ssalazars
I'm also working on a Java + Dropwizard project. MongoDB is the option I went
with as a DB, and SendGrid for transactional emails.

Did you evaluate Digital Ocean as an option?

------
titanix88
I am building an interactive voice broadcasting solution as a SaaS at
[http://dandydialer.com](http://dandydialer.com) . Back-end API is built on
Clojure, Datomic and freeswitch. I am using Clojurescript, Reagent, Reframe
and Re-com for the front-end. Deployment and system orchestration is built on
LXD and Ansible.

Pardon the website, as there isn't much to see there. We are still in alpha
stage. Yes, Clojure ecosystem has been a tremendous help in engineering the
system. As a former python dev, I think Clojure made a whole lot of mandatory
moving parts unnecessary - like celery and redis for designing such a system.
Also, ditching Javascript+react ecosystem with better wrappers has been an
absolute blast so far.

------
speedplane
If you look through the comments on this page, it's pretty amazing that almost
every single person uses a different tech stack. A non-scientific perusal
suggests that Python, Django, RabbitMQ, and PostgreSQL are the most common
stacks, but this is still a minority.

Amazing that after decades of software development on the web, there is still
no "best practice" even though many of these web apps do very similar things.
In most other mature industries, best practices tend to settle on just a few
approaches. Not so for software development.

------
gii2
Web: .NET Core, VueJS, SQL Server

Mobile: Xamarin

CI/CD: Azure Devops, AKS

Reason for choosing it: 15+ years of experience with C#, Vue is easy to learn,
Xamarin is also C# for both Android and iOS

------
TheFullStack
Two EC2 micros running Ubuntu & Nginx, Mongo DB, AWS Lambda, Cloudfront, S3,
API Gateway, NodeJS/Express, React/Redux, and the usual frontend stuff
(javascript, bootstrap, SASS, etc), Let's Encrypt for SSL

The platform is a hosting provider where every site runs off a Lambda
function. As such, the hosting costs are miniscule ($0 for almost 2500 sites).
The only real fees are the EC2 instances.

Site - [https://www.turbo360.co/about](https://www.turbo360.co/about)

------
jamesponddotco
I do not usually comment on Hacker News, but heck, I am actually proud of what
I am building this time. I run an open-source WordPress hosting company
focused on privacy — well, kinda, it is in closed beta —, so my stack is,
maybe, a little boring.

Dedicated AMD 32 core RAID 10 servers from Hetzner running LXD for customer
containers — seven containers per server on the cheapest plan. Each dedicated
server has their filesystem encrypted with LUKS — including /boot — and each
container runs the "default" WordPress stack, i.e., NGINX, PHP-FPM, MariaDB,
Redis, ElasticSearch, Postfix, WP-CLI, fail2ban, monit, aide, etc.

WordPress is modified to leak less data by default — heck, by default you can
use their REST API to get the email of anyone who leaves a comment —, have a
better-looking dashboard experience, and each container runs a TOR bridge to
help people in oppressive regimes.

All servers run a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, resolve DNS queries
using one of my 8 DNSCrypt servers, are managed using on-premise Canonical
Landscape and connect to a Hashicorp Vault instance for credentials and
whatnot.

Backups are handled by another big Hetzner server — sitting at 60 TB of
storage right now —, by Rsync.net in their Switzerland location and by another
server in my house. All backups are encrypted by default, but I still need to
implement a way to test them to make sure they work.

The customer portal is being built with Laravel and will connect to the
Hashicorp Vault instance to get credentials for customers. We didn't choose
the payment gateway yet, as the company is incorporated in Romania and options
are kinda scarce, but we will probably go with Adyen and BitPay, which will
connect to our Invoice Ninja instance.

The onboarding process for new customers is handled with Jitsi Meet — again,
another Hetzner server.

The help desk was initially handled by Help Scout, but I migrated to Full Help
recently — which I found on Hacker News —, and I could not be happier. The
developer behind it is super awesome and went as far as adding GPG encryption
and Postmark support when I asked for it.

I do have six other partners, but as I am currently building everything out
myself, I guess it qualifies as a company of one? Partners will be responsible
for different parts of the business, i.e., legal, documentation, and whatnot.

~~~
madamelic
>my stack is, maybe, a little boring.

>Dedicated AMD 32 core RAID 10 servers from Hetzner running LXD for customer
containers — seven containers per server on the cheapest plan. Each dedicated
server has their filesystem encrypted with LUKS — including /boot

>All servers run a slightly modified version of Ubuntu, resolve DNS queries
using one of my 8 DNSCrypt servers, are managed using on-premise Canonical
Landscape and connect to a Hashicorp Vault instance for credentials and
whatnot.

>Backups are handled by another big Hetzner server — sitting at 60 TB of
storage right now

... I'd love to see what you consider exciting!

Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a
private beta product.

~~~
jamesponddotco
> ... I'd love to see what you consider exciting!

I mean, in the age of Kubernetes and AWS, having your entire stack running on
a single server does sound kinda dull to most people. I rather have the
performance and simplicity, though.

> Just a side note, do you all have revenue? This seems very overbuilt for a
> private beta product.

Yes. All customers on the private beta have a 50% discount, but our profit
margin is pretty high, to be honest.

The "Medium" plan, which is where all tests are happening, cost us €215,88 per
month, which includes the dedicated server, one IP address for each LXD
container, about 700 GB of bandwidth from BunnyCDN and emails by Mailgun.

In that plan, we offer 16 GB of ECC memory and 240 GB of NVMe storage. One of
our competitors charge $1500 per month for 200 GB of storage, our price is
€599.00 per month.

So even with high-profit margins, our cost is below our competition. Which
makes you wonder how much profit they make.

But, of course, none of this account for operational costs, employee costs,
SaaS costs and things like premium plugins which are offered by default and
CDN bandwidth above 700GB — which realistically speaking, will be higher for
some customers.

~~~
eb0la
Kubernetes and wordpress is not that simple. Might be sexy, but not simple.

For me, the stopper is WP is thought to be used inside a server with _mutable_
access to everything; whilst k8s needs containers.

This looks good for day-to-day use until you realize your wp needs updating
_and_ needs to be done by the operator/editor and _somehow_ propagated back to
the system that builds the container.

Usually this is an air gap.

~~~
jamesponddotco
I dislike Kubernetes in general, and much prefer something like LXD for
WordPress.

My point was that most people consider my way of doing things "boring", while
everything else, i.e., serverless technology, is over hyped.

------
juanre
I built [https://greaterskies.com](https://greaterskies.com) with Common Lisp
making the star maps, talking to the clients via a thin layer of plain Python,
running on several EC2 instances and storing everything in SDB. Front end is
plain Javascript with JQuery.

------
tarungarg546
Django, Python 2.7, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, uWSGI, Nginx, Celery,
RabbitMQ, Ubuntu, GitHub, ELK for logging, Bootstrap CSS, Fabric Scripts and
AWS:- EC2, Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, S3, RDS, KMS, Glacier, Elasticsearch,
etc.

Effects:- This tech is mature now and comes with steroids in its own, hence we
never faced major difficulties wrt to tech stack and that's always a good
place to be in. (Good read on the same topic:-
[https://www.intercom.com/blog/run-less-
software/](https://www.intercom.com/blog/run-less-software/))

And we're hiring [http://www.squadvoice.co/careers-
us/](http://www.squadvoice.co/careers-us/)

------
SavageBeast
AWS EC2 instance running basic Ubuntu, Amazon RDS running MySQL, Nginx for SSL
termination and proxy to application server, Lets Encrypt for SSL cert
generation/maintenance, Apache Tomcat for said application server, Java
codebase for REST services ( Jersey/Jackson and the odd Servlet ), Materialize
for some visual JS conveniences, Plan ole HTML and JQuery for the rest of the
front end.

It's a minimal stack with intentionally dead-simple architecture. Its the
lowest common denominator in Boring Technology.

Someday when we scale beyond One Developer I don't want to be trying to hire
the best Blockchain Rust DevOps Cloud Engineer Stanford CS produced last year
... I want to hire a contractor who knows SQL, HTML and has seen Javascript
and Java.

~~~
madamelic
KISS at its max.

Always good to underbuild then adopt complications as needed.

------
juskrey
Parallel to consulting/freelancing, I am doing 1-2 attempts in a year to start
some meaningful business.

Stack is: NixOS, because, despite the learning curve and all the quirks, at
the end I love having all the infrastructure configs in one folder (so I never
forget that I have an obscure cron job somewhere).

Clojure/ClojureScript, because I am good at Clojure (this is what I do on
freelancing side)

For simple services that's always a Datomic on MariaDB (with a replication
server) and a backend. Servers run on Hetzner ($2-$5 instances are fine, with
replication I need two) Backups on S3.

------
lopmotr
I feel like an outsider but: VB.net, Winforms and DirectX 9. Also the odd bit
of C++ for interfacing with some 3rd party libraries where performance is
important.

My customers are engineers (of the traditional type) and Windows is very
popular among them. I chose VB.net because it solved some problems I was
having with VB6, which I chose because I inherited it from my predecessor who
used it when it was the fashionable thing.

------
billconan
[https://epiphany.pub/](https://epiphany.pub/)

My frontend is vue.js

My backend is in a home made c++ framework. I'm rewriting it to achieve even
higher performance and concurrency. I think my choice of c++ helps me save
server resources, and it can be deployed easily. (just scp a folder of a few
binaries)

my database is mongodb for now. However, I want to switch to postgresql.

~~~
umen
Can you share what cpp stack u are using ? Thanks

------
faeyanpiraat
Nowadays you can mostly solve any problems with wildly different tech
combinations, so I increasingly feel that the tech does not matter.

So i guess sticking with what you already know is the best when starting out.

Finding product/market fit is waaaay more difficult than learning new tech.

You will have time to optimize it later when you get traction and the product
kept together by duct tape starts to fall apart under pressure.

------
jwilliams
Frontend - React / TypeScript

Backend - Lambda / TypeScript

Infrastructure - AWS CDK / TypeScript

Kept in a monorepo, which means tightly-coupled code-sharing between all the
different components.

Definitely has it's negatives - but being in small startup (solo technical)
also means lots of interruptions and chopping and changing.

Having one language, stack, and repo makes it much easier to me to start,
stop, and pick things up as I go.

~~~
madamelic
>monorepo, which means tightly-coupled code-sharing between all the different
components.

It's funny how one persons dream is another person's nightmare.

Tightly coupled software is horrifying to me. Modularization all the way;
define contracts then build away.

~~~
jwilliams
Tightly-coupled doesn't necessarily mean you don't have contracts.

In this case, the contract is shared TypeScript types between the front and
back-ends. This means you can statically verify as much as the type system
allows.

------
asplake
Flask, Python, SqlAlchemy, JSON API, numpy, scipy; more jQuery than React; AWS
Elastic Beanstalk and RDS

The stack mostly just works - in that regard it’s much easier being a
developer now. The really pleasant surprise was how little code I needed for
the numeric stuff (basic ML with PCA).

[https://www.agendashift.com](https://www.agendashift.com)

------
Axsuul
I run Trunk[1] which helps e-commerce businesses that sell in multiple places
sync their inventory in real-time. It’s a very infrastructure and backend-
heavy app that’s currently running across 7-10 Google Cloud instances (mostly
preemptible) that can scale up/down depending on load (e.g. a large customer
signs up, Black Friday)

In development, all services can be brought up using Docker Compose within a
monorepo.

Frontend: Ember.js Backend: Ruby on Rails, nginx, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq,
VueJS (marketing site) Metrics: Prometheus, Grafana, Papertrail
Infrastructure: Ubuntu, Docker Swarm CI/CD: Google Cloud Build

I also run a few ad-hoc scripts in Google Cloud Run that perform very specific
duties like triggering CI/CD builds or sending Slack notifications.

Google Cloud Platform is great!

[1] [https://trunkinventory.com](https://trunkinventory.com)

------
it
I'm running [https://zerosearch.io](https://zerosearch.io) on a single 16gb
standard instance with 6 vcpus on Digital Ocean with the "Ubuntu Docker
5:19.03.1~3 on 18.04" image. The memory is important to keep an index for the
top 1000 github repositories. It could probably do just as well with only one
or two CPUs. The app is made up of two Docker containers: the indexer and the
webserver. I'm using Cloudflare, which makes the site a lot faster and greatly
reduces load on the webserver. For now there is no database. The code is a
fork of [https://github.com/google/zoekt](https://github.com/google/zoekt),
written in Go.

The stack is simple and easy to work with, locally and in prod.

~~~
anarchyrucks
I just forked the zoekt project for myself to get a better web UI. Small
world.

------
LeonB
\- ubuntu droplets at digitalocean, running .net core. \- C# coded in visual
studio.net on Windows. \- git

Effect on success: knew the tech well so did not have to spend time learning
the tech in addition to all the business learning.

Making a business is very involved. If you can simplify the technology side
it’s a good idea.

------
nerdbeere
I run a SaaS page builder that generates amp websites for my customers. It's
targeted towards small agencies that currently rely on wordpress.

\--

Backend: Node.js hosted on AWS ECS (Docker) and Lambda Frontend: JavaScript,
React Database: Postgres (AWS RDS; thinking about switching to serverless
aurora)

As for delivering my clients sites I recently switched from cloudfront to
stackpath (DNS, CDN) because the pricing model makes more sense for me and it
doesn't have arbitrary limitations like the distribution limit.

Other tech I use:

\- Terraform for my whole infrastructure

\- AWS SES for sending mails

\- AWS Cognito for authentication and managing user accounts

\- AWS Cloudfront combined with lambda@edge for delivering images in the right
size for the requester (src-set)

\- Github

\- AWS CodePipeline for CI and deployments (source input through github
releases)

~~~
xcubic
Care to share?

------
nnspace
I built CoderTest [1]. It is an online screening platform to evaluate a
software engineer’s technical abilities.

I'm using a combination of Node.js, Golang, React+Redux, Express.js, MongoDB,
Redis, Docker, AWS Fargate, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Netlify, AWS SNS, AWS SES,
Stripe and Github.

I managed to go from idea to product in 3 weekends. I could have built the
same thing with any programming language and hosting provider, but not with
the same speed. The result is that I am able to iterate and build much faster
by using a tech stack that I am very familiar with.

[1] [https://codertest.io](https://codertest.io)

------
isubasinghe
I'm building [https://airloom.xyz](https://airloom.xyz) at the moment, its an
heirloom tracker. This is for university, tech stack was all determined by me
but this is a group project, that being said I think it qualifies to be on
here since it is most likely much smaller of a project given it's for one
university subject.

Elastic Beanstalk with ELB and EC2 autoscaling running Node.js backend

React for SPA

Cognito for user management/auth

Github for source control

CodePipeline for CI and deployments

Cloudfront with lambda@edge for SPA

Cloudinary for media hosting

RDS for database

LogRocket for frontend error capturing

Sentry for backend error capturing

Lambda to write a new user to RDS after confirmation trigger from cognito.

------
AlchemistCamp
Elixr, Phoenix, Postgres, Ubuntu and Gitlab CI/CD, hosted on Digital Ocean.

In my case, since I'm _teaching_ this stack (at
[https://alchemist.camp](https://alchemist.camp)), it was a great choice. I
think there's a bit more credibility in using what I'm teaching instead of
just using an off-the-shelf solution, and it's also been a source of
inspiration for some of the content, too.

Being able to handle more visitors and traffic than I'll ever likely get on a
total infrastructure cost of just over $7/month, is great, too.

~~~
ooooak
Hii, I am subbed to your youtube :)

------
MrGman
Microsoft Frontpage + java script snippet websites + Geocities. /s

~~~
yyyk
I'd be more impressed if you used a real language like java for java applets.
You can't seriously program in a toy language like javascript. And you may
wish to consider adding in some Flash for animations to spice up your site. /s

------
mamcx
I have used more than 10 languages now, but I'm moving to Rust. Apart of that:

\- PostgreSQL + Sqlite. I try to use both for everything: Log analysis,
reports, dashboards, etc + obvious crud stuff. \- Python3 for scripting \- If
have not choice: HTML, JS + Vue \- Simple vultr/digital ocean vps

Rust allow me to get rid of docker (just deploy a binary! Like in my Delphi
days!) and other complex stuff. I'm near "copy-paste" deployment now.

My only fancy tech now is using azure pipelines for compile across platforms
(like android + ios).

------
rorygibson
I built, and run, Trolley [1], a simple payments tool that lets you take
payments from any website (or just a link).

It's Clojure in the back end, on Postegres, on Heroku. Everything in the
product front-end is ClojureScript, with reagent, hosted in S3 behind
CloudFront.

All deployments through CircleCI, GitHub for VCS. Emacs for development, on a
Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu :)

Marketing website is a static site, built with Middleman; again, CloudFront +
S3.

1\. [https://trolley.link](https://trolley.link)

------
nemiah
I create and sell business software for writing invoices and managing
customers. It is also available for rent and I use the following stack for my
own cloud:

Debian, KVM, Apache, MySQL (with Percona for clustering), GlusterFS, rSync,
HAProxy, PHP, jQuery

I actually own 3 servers :) I know, it's super boring, but this stack has only
failed me once in about five years.

Yes, in my opinion this stack has helped me a lot in earning a living with my
company because it just works and saves me time to do other things that earn
money.

~~~
jitendrac
Can you share me the details of your service? I need simplest solution for
Customer registering order, Verifying order against stock availability to
create invoce and delivering it. An affiliate/reference management will be
plus.

~~~
nemiah
You can take a look: [https://www.open3a.de](https://www.open3a.de) The
software is mostly in German, so I'm not sure if it's a fit ;)

~~~
jitendrac
Great, yes It is not fit for my needs. Still a good product. As it is open
source, you should make a github repo and invite contributors for the global
translation module.

~~~
nemiah
Yes, I could do that, but I could not support the users of e.g. a spanish
version because my spanish is quite poor. This is why I settled for the german
speaking market. That's Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Still enough money
to earn :)

~~~
jitendrac
You really don't need to support any one. It is an OSS none can blame if you
don't fix his issue. All you do is just invite him to contribute changes they
want ;)

Think it like, I am an Indian and want this software in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil.
What I will do is grab your global English file, Translate the appropriate
part of strings to my choice of language and push those changes to your
software. which means user who are capable will support ecosystem.

------
docsapp_io
I run a SaaS that building and hosting developer hub
[https://www.docsapp.io](https://www.docsapp.io) using the following
technologies.

Backend: Scala and Playframework

Frontend: Jquery

DB: RDS, Postgresql on AWS

Hosting: Baremetal on Scaleway

DNS: AWS Route53

Object Store: AWS S3

CDN: AWS CloudFront

Infrastructure: Ansible and Kubernetes

Monitoring: CloudWatch and Influxdb + Grafana in k8s

Logging: ELK in k8s

Scaleway is a great hosting with cheap price. Instead of finding reliable but
expensive hosting, I prefer cheaper hosting, but more servers and build HA to
handle server issue. Server die all the time.

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surfgreen_dev
Python Django, Django Rest Framework, Celery, Redis, Postgres, Celery, Google
Firebase, VueJS, Vuetify, Vuex, NuxtJs, Heroku, Google Firebase, AWS,
Bitbucket, Google Cloud functions, Cloudflare

Advantage: You can run a lot of stuff with a free tier setup, minimising the
amount of investment in the beginning.

I use this setup to run [https://www.surfgreen.dev](https://www.surfgreen.dev)

and to develop energy efficient, sustainable and green websites and webapps.

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lnenad
I run a webapp that allows you to mock your API. With a lot of different
bloatware webpages/apps/frameworks, when making
[https://mockadillo.com](https://mockadillo.com) I tried to keep it light.

Go server rendered pages + vanilla Javascript, with Postgres + Redis. Simple
cicd using github + gocd and docker swarm. The simple setup and no framework
allows for minimal page load times, and no browser impact.

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p0d
For the past ten years at [https://freeperiod.co.uk](https://freeperiod.co.uk)
I have been doing php/mysql/jquery. Somewhere down the line I got into
bootstrap as well. People were telling me my idea and execution of it were
rubbish ten years and I guess I am still here.

I wouldn't worry too much about the stack of the day. Crack on and make
something you can call your own.

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Jack000
lamp for web app, python for ml bits, node for a couple of things that have
handy node packages.

I use pretty much anything that gets the job done with the least dev time.

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crgwbr
I run a low traffic, but fairly mission-critical web app for ~100 active
users. Backend is Python 3, Django, Django Channels, Django Rest Framework.
Postgres for DB, Redis as a cache and message queue. Front end is React and
Typescript. Everything runs in Nginx proxied Docker containers on an Ubuntu
EC2 box, except for Postgres (which is RDS).

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Felz
Working on an email hosting company. Stack is Kotlin, Postgres, Docker, AWS.

It's likely been helpful because it's a stack I'm good with, and it has very
mature tooling and libraries (via JVM). The alternative was basically C, which
has higher quality mailserver libraries but seemed a lot harder to work with
from my point of view.

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alanmontgomery
[https://simpleboard.tech](https://simpleboard.tech) Landing page in
HTML/JS/CSS - set it up very quickly, gonna convert to ReactJS for
maintainability soon.

Actual product though i'm building in ReactJS / will have PHP / PostgreSQL
backend.

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gls2ro
Backend Programming Language: Ruby

Web framework: Ruby on Rails

UI JS/CSS Framework: Bootstrap, Bulma

DB: PostgreSQL

Hosting: Vultr, Digital Ocean, Heroku

External Products: Amazon SES, Sendgrid

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philippz
PHP/Laravel, Javascript/VueJS, ElasticSearch, MySQL, Memcached, NGINX, SQS,
SLS, everything on AWS

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somada141
Backend: OSX, Vagrant, Ubuntu 16.04, Python 3.7, Falcon (APIs), Ansible (local
VM provisioning and deployment), SQLAlchemy, Postgres, GraphQL (through
Graphene and Graphene-SQLAlchemy), Kong (API gateway)

Frontend: Angular 7, Angular Material 7, Apollo GraphQL

SaaS (free tiers): Auth0, Sentry.io, Smallchat, Braintree, Netlify

Hosting: Hetzner

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dahx4Eev
I run a simple search service [1] with a Golang REST backend, and a frontend
built with VueJS.

Other tech I use

\- Serverless framework on AWS Lambda

\- Postgres

\- Sidekiq

\- Dokku

\- Sentry

\- New Relic

\- gRPC and Twirp [2]

\- Netlify

\- Firebase

[1] [https://www.searchbx.com](https://www.searchbx.com)

[2] [https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp](https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp)

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andrei_says_
Rails, Postgres, heroku. The fastest most reliable and pleasant way to build
an mvp that I know of.

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davidweatherall
Flask, Python 3, MySQL, SQL Alchemy, React, Google App Engine, Google Cloud
Storage, Google SQL

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ym705
I work with SailsJS (backendandlayouts), Bulma for CSS and Vue for more
complex pages, PostgreSQL for DB all hostedon Digital Ocean.

Development goes really fast forMVP (for eg
[https://dokomaps.com](https://dokomaps.com))

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rasikjain
I use the tech-stack which I am familiar with and been using over the period
of time.

This gets the job done with minimal friction and ease of use.

Stack: C#, .NET Core, WebAPI, Javascript, ReactJS, TypeScript, SQL Server,
MongoDB, Windows /IIS, Jenkins, GIT, AWS.

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chvid
Web analytics tool.

React + bulma. Java 12/latest with homemade minimal stack. MySQL database.
Digital ocean box running a tomcat servlet container.

I know it well and it is very fast to work with (fast edit / test / deploy
cycle).

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anonymousBarker
Development: 3 bare metal servers with k8 + workstation with Debian 10 and
kde. Kdevelop, Qt Creator, g++, clang, libboost. Sqlite, postgres, arangodb.

Web: stbl + nginx on a linode.

Data Infrastructure: Nextcloud containerized on a linode.

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ChrisMarshallNY
Swift.

Making libraries and apps for Apple stuff. Mostly open-source, but I have some
closed-source stuff on the stove, as well.

It seems to make me a bit of an outlier, but I enjoy the work.

Success? More will be revealed...

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heurisko
Ubuntu, Postgres, Java 11, Spring Boot, nginx, Digital Ocean, Amazon SES and
S3, Ansible, Javascript as "sprinkles", otherwise Web 1.0.

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claudiug
ruby + heroku + vue + postgres

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alanmontgomery
[https://trackmylift.app](https://trackmylift.app)

Front end: ReactJS, Firebase Back end: PHP, SQL

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iracic
PostgreSQL, Golang, VueJS, old fashioned VMs

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goalexboxer
Currently building a product. I use node (Strapi CMS), Create React App (+
Typescript). I'm planning to use Heroku.

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rabbimarshak
aws lambda, api gateway, s3, cloudfront, route53, rds postgres, express js
react, next js

100% infrastructure as code using serverless framework and cloudformation.
architecture scales well, is fully managed, and super cheap to run. almost no
cost if no users. express + next js + lambda pretenders the ui for speed and
seo.

~~~
cddotdotslash
This, exactly. When you're one person, you don't want to be dealing with
server hardening and making sure the CPU hasn't been exhausted, or getting
DDoS'd and trying to scale up your servers. I ran a website on S3 with a
CloudFront CDN fronting it handling for less than a few dollars per month.

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perakojotgenije
web: python, web2py, nginx, uwsgi, jquery, bootstrap

db: postgres

hosting: centos on linode servers

external services: mailgun, geoipservice, paypal, paddle

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alienspaces
Frontend: Quasar / viewjs

Backend: Go / Postgres / Elasticsearch

Infrastructure: Google Cloud / GKE

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knocte
Desktop: F#, Mono

Mobile: Xamarin

CI/CD: GitlabCI(Linux), GithubActions(macOS+Windows)

Soon: Rust

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dominotw
datamoic/ ions

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gravityfell
[deleted]

~~~
gravityfell
sorry misread the title.

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malms
Python

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DATACOMMANDER
I’m not a solo business owner, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the ones
who are successful turn their weakness into a strength by using some obscure
tech stack that they’re a wizard with but that no one else uses. It’s a trite
thought here on HN, but if I were a one-man shop I really would try to use a
Lisp dialect.

~~~
ldabiralai
I hope you see the irony in your comment

~~~
amval
I think maybe he is being sarcastic...

