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Comment by trcollinson | Hacker News Reader

If you are trying to make money and ship a product, then I have seen far worse than just a Front end and a Firebase. Go for it. Get your product in front of paying people as quickly as possible, then sell sell sell. You'll probably fail (the default state of a start up is failure), but you'll learn a lot along the way.

If your hope is to learn how to write code for other peoples products and have them pay you, it would benefit you to get a more full stack education. Node would be good. Rails is nice. Django is nice. .Net works well. Java is good.

It just depends on what your goals really are.

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Agree, except for that last part.

At this stage OP won't know which backend language/tech will be best suited to whichever idea ends up taking off.

So, best to just use whichever is most popular (and with the best trajectory) since popularity leads to other advantages. Choosing rails now, for example, would not make sense.

If you do front end, just learn node. Both are js. Plus you can share code. 2 in 1.

The lack of structure in node is really bad for beginners.

While it is harder to actually do something, node helped me understand how web development "really" works. I started with Rails - I could put a simple app together, but I had no idea how it worked. It wasn't until I worked with node, where I had to do my own routing, controllers, models, database connections, etc, until I finally could understand what was happening under the hood in Rails.

Fair enough. I mean if we are talking purely "getting a job as an engineer eventually" then .Net and Java own the market in my area. Though there are plenty of positions in Javascript, Python, Ruby, and even C/C++. I would imagine other areas vary heavily (and the data I have seems to show that). Pick the thing that will get you to your goal, I would say.

What is your reasoning for it not making sense to choose rails now? It's mature and has a big community no?

Hard to recommend it to a beginner, but not sure if I would recommend Node or Java to a beginner either, so that's a tough one.

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