Ask HN: What tech stack do you use for quick web side projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tech stack do you use for quick web side projects?

7 pointschrisshroba11 comments

This is as "quick" as side projects go: https://crushentropy.com/ (Markdown for hi-res planning). I made it one weekend a couple years ago and I've used it myself ever since.

App served by Flask running on App Engine. Data persisted to Firebase. Costs me approximately $0 per month. 100% uptime afaik.

This is cool! Did you document the format or is it really limited to what we see on the front page?

Thanks. I'll expand on it. In the meantime perhaps try out the demo. That'll give you step by step examples.

I like it! Any code one might look at? Do you use it alongside a normal calendar?

Thanks. Most of the work is done here: https://crushentropy.com/static/plan.js

Yes I use CrushEntropy for planning my day and tracking how I spend time through the day (a column of plans next to a column of actual gives you a good sense of how things are going), and Google Calendar for all meetings.

I plan to add some selective syncing with Google Calendar. I haven't had a pressing need for it though. Do you need that?

Flask (Python) for super simple stuff with no db (I have a custom ldap user and groups manager for example) with semantic ui frontend and crude html. Ktor in kotlin for any API thing that needs to last. Spring boot in kotlin for stuff that require auth and db with vue.js in front using type script. (Makes developing one week viable products doable)

Heroku is my go-to for spinning up a quick stack with minimal effort. Their free-tier is pretty powerful. It's mainly for POC-type work so if you're trying to launch something into production, you will most likely need to switch to a paid plan or a different platform / solution.

React + Firebase (auth and DB) + whatever minimal CSS I run across.

None of my personal projects get used much so none of the costs of Firebase really come into play for me.

JavaScript (vanilla or Angular), Bootstrap, GitHub Pages.

rails

A few weeks ago I had a bunch of data I needed to be able to play around with. I’m not great at Excel but I spun up a quick app in Rails and fed the data into a local Postgres db and played around with it there very easily. Didn’t need auth or CSS or JS or anything but just out of the box Rails. The scaffold pages were more than enough for the data I was playing with. All in all it took maybe 15 minutes to get everything set up and configured.

I sometimes use Flask for the same thing but I end up having to write my own HTML and CSS and routes and... Rails just takes care of all of that. I find it faster by a huge margin.

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