Comment by Uchikoma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uchikoma | Hacker News Reader

Technology is not important for your startup. Choose whatever you know. Then go from there and fix it when you scale because you've found a market.

About time to market: From my experience (and Reinertsen [1]) time to market is not lost during programming but during the decision phase. Optimize your decision speed (reduce meetings, don't postpone decisions, have a clear decider, know what to decide and what not, ...), not your technology stack if you want to beat others to market.

I did have an offer for some years: Anyone beating a Java (the COBOL of the internet world) stack 5x to market, I pay him $1000. No one did take it yet.

One of my slide deck on the topic:

http://www.slideshare.net/Stephan.Schmidt/what-everyone-shou...

[1] "Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools" Preston G. Smith, Donald G. Reinertsen

I'd add one thing, though about an optimized stack for a startup with a lot of unknowns. I've attended a couple hackathons and such and seeing how much traction and how quick small teams are able to piece stuff together with a JavaScript/Node.JS/MongoDB stack is pretty staggering. Not sure if it scales far down the road or what issues people will run into, but having a single language across the entire stack seems to have some productivity benefits. Especially when you have a developer that has to work in two or three of the layers (UI/Server/DB) all at once...

There was some VC around here who talked about the advantage that startups have because they can choose some of these tools to quickly develop in and such...

Not sure how Nodejs helps, I agree that Mongo helps, schemaless is easier to evolve from my experience than MySQL e.g.

Right now I skip from writing heavy JavaScript in the UI (AngularJS) to writing Python on the server. It's a context switch, how I iterate over collections, parse strings, etc. is totally different. I'm not in love with Node.JS, but love the idea of a single language/code constructs throughout the stack. Especially in a small-team startup environment. Maybe someone can come out with a synchronous server-side JS engine? :)

Just realized that it's also a context switch when I go from Python to Mongo, especially when I'm working in the Mongo shell.

I had similar thoughts seven years ago when Ruby on Rails was being sold as 10x faster to develop in....I wondered why no one would build my website for 1/10th the price.

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