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Comment by elmigranto | Hacker News Reader

> Old and boring is still sometimes the best.

It's not so much old vs new, or cool vs boring, but rather the thing you are most experienced with. If the goal is to just build the damn thing, go with a stack you would be most productive in.

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Exactly. I'm making 25k month with a SaaS that was built on boring ASP.NET+SQL Server+Angular 1 because that's what I knew. I host it on Windows because I know how to make it fast and secure. I'm happy I focused all my time on building the features that clients were asking for, instead of learning the latest frameworks or fighting an OS I'm not familiar with.

What's your product? Have you written about it?

Yeah, just to second this idea, I would like to read about it, also, though I am totally unfamiliar with the technology being used.

Is that 25k USD? :)

Somali Shillings

Doesn't it make sense to be specific with the currency you are talking about on an international forum? I realise the US is the worlds most powerful country with a very important currency, but it doesn't follow that we should always just assume that any currency spoken about is USD.

It does make sense to be specific, but I find the only people who aren't specific are usually Americans so we can assume these figures are USD.

While this forum does have people from all over the world (I'm living in London), it also is a forum headquarted by a seed accelerator based in the US.

Yes - I'm doing about 33K per month on a SaaS that is just Rails/Postgres/Heroku - the only javascript is some basic JQuery.

Cool! Can I ask what your SaaS is?

He is called throwaway29464 for a reason :)

Amateur. I make about 35k/month using only bash via CGI and some plain text files as database.

Serious? or joking? :) If the former, would love to know more.

Actually, I wonder if the creator of WWWBoard/FormMail/etc achieved that. It certainly would've been well earned. His stuff was everywhere (I used them a lot too).

Pft. I make 42k/month using only butterflies like a real programmer.

  built on boring [...] Angular 1

Ah yes, the halcyon yesteryear of Angular 1.

This is a little-known fact, but Angular 1 was actually released on the same year as FORTRAN II.

As per Wikipedia FORTRAN II appeared in 1958 [1]. Don't remember Javascript being around at that time. Am I missing something?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_II

Just the joke :)

You're missing the joke.

Sarcastic remark

I was just joking, but I appreciate how carefully-worded your reply was :)

Ah, silly me :) I'm not that familiar with the history of Fortran so I thought maybe some cool Fortran reincarnation (hence II) was released a few years ago.

At the time I started the project, there seemed to be a new article on top of HN every week telling me how Angular is bad and why I should learn React. Since I had been using Angular for a while on my day job, yes, Angular was the boring choice.

When I’ve seen people set out to learn something and build something, they tend to accomplish neither—but if they focus on just one of those, the other is often a happy side effect.

But often, you only learn something by building something.

performa prototype build of a thing you've already built. You'll gain the new knowledge in context, making it even more valuable.

The golden rule in my experience is that you can have both, if being careful in the proportions. Usually I limit new things to 1-2 concepts/tools a time, and use well tried ones for others. This way I usually manage to get stuff done and avoid getting stuck in my comfort zone.

Note: I have some hobby projects with minimal progress, where I ignore the golden rule and try new stuff all the time :)

Or you know, many set out to neither learn nor build, mostly to avoid chores and homework, and somehow end up having learnt and built and ended up with a good technology job.

As a counterpoint, I recently built something in a framework (Rails) that was relatively new to me because the framework had large amounts of functionality available as open source components (info in profile).

I reviewed other options, including technologies that I was more familiar with, but the risk of slower development while I came up to speed was outweighed by the increase in speed to market.

I did just that about a year ago. I moved over from a an MS stack to a Linux/Node/Postgres stack. And while I finally got the damn product shipped - it was a terrible idea to change my tooling/environment so dramatcially. Everything took way longer. And honestly, the quality of the end product is worse.

What motivated the change? Were Linux/Node/Postgres technologies you were familiar with in comparison to the MS stack you were using? This can be problematic regardless of the technologies involved.

This can definitely depend on the technology and the use case. For instance, I'm building a .NET desktop application and started using WinForms since I have several years experience with it. I scrapped that and started using XAML for the first time and I am already more productive in XAML than I am with Winforms. I have a cleaner UI and an easier time with the architecture due to the data binding.

My point is that there are technologies that if you are using a technology that is a pain in the ass (Winforms) but that is all you know moving to a newer technology that has been designed to be easier to use can not only benefit what you are building but even save you time in the long run.

> It's not so much old vs new, or cool vs boring, but rather the thing you are most experienced with. If the goal is to just build the damn thing, go with a stack you would be most productive in.

This exactly. Customers do not care what the product was written in, as long as it solves their problem. I find this is a hard thing for programmers as we are generally curious and want to be learning. It is important to remember the goal. If the goal is the learn, then go learn. If it's to ship some software to start a business, then use the tools you know and ship something.

Spot on, execution means everything.

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