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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see a mention of Ghost on HN I'm reminded of a 2018 interview the founder of the project did with a podcast (SE Daily) in which he said he wished, in retrospect, that he had chosen Laravel or some other PHP framework instead of NodeJS as they would have been "years further down the features pipeline by now." I wonder if he still feels that way.

Link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2018/07/26/ghost-open-s...

Edit: You can search for "Laravel" in the transcript and see an algorithmic attempt at transcribing that part of the conversation: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...

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I'm still on the fence about this one a bit! From a product PoV — god yes I wish we just used Laravel. We'd have been able to move about 8x as fast and get so much more built for users just because the ecosystem is so much better developed. When Ghost first launched in 2013, there wasn't even an off the shelf RSS lib!

That said, Ghost succeeded in large part because it was a new and interesting Node thing, and we might never have gotten as far as we have done without that :)

> When Ghost first launched in 2013, there wasn't even an off the shelf RSS lib!

Is there a blog post or retrospective about the things y'all had to invent/adapt/overcome in using NodeJS? Your interview was the topic of much conversation where I worked at the time; we were a C# shop instead of PHP/Node but we were moving into Big Data and there was agitation to adopt every trendy language for the various bits of the pipeline (Scala for Spark; Java for Storm; Python just because) and your comments about using a stack you know well and Dan KcKinley's "Choose Boring Technology" blog post[1] were the touchstones for the "let's not get too trendy with our language/tech choices" camp.

[1] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Having started a large project in 2012/13 (which is still running), I wish I had done the same. Although, if I remember correctly, the ecosystem around Laravel was still very young at the time.

I'd say laravel wasn't really worth using until 5.1. 2012 sounds about around 4.0, which is when I started using it.

Great nugget. Thanks for sharing.

Here is the transcript: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...

Sorry -- didn't see your reply before posting an update to my comment with a link to the transcript.

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