I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of maintenance/scaling up and how well-guarded you are against vulnerabilities.
Yes and no. The tech doesn't matter but that is The Point. That is, your tech won't save bad product. Using the latest cool kids framework or buzzwordy tool won't save bad product.
Yes, the business you're in matters. No, it doesn't matter how you build them - as long as it's quickly. If you outgrow you're overly simplistic stack, that is a _great_ problem to have.
Arguably Pieter might be at this point already and he doesn’t care. With the right tech and more people he could scale some of his businesses further but he deliberately doesn’t want that as its diminished returns for him, personally.
Right on. With complexity also comes responsibility and commitment. Sometimes less is more. It might not be sexy. It might not win awards. But that can mean less stress and less risk.
If there is one thing I've learned in this business it is that when your tech stack becomes an "issue" for your business success, you've probably "made it" success-wise.
So many technical folks lose site of the fact that no matter how many "cool" technologies you deploy out of the gate, it really doesn't matter if the market and customers aren't paying you revenue. Period.
If you don't get why the fact a high successful venture is using such a barebones tech stack is not noteworthy, you must be following a different tech industry than I am
I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.
Any application can be said to be written in a single file if you ignore all of the libraries and just dump everything else into a single file, HN included. That's not a rational measure of simplicity, elegance or efficiency.
What the parent and original post seem to be implying is that simplicity, efficiency, tech stack (or lack there of), isn't what drives success in a business, it is instead the customers paying.
Sure having a modern infrastructure that is able to process thousands of requests per second is better than something that can only do a few hundred, but if you strip out a bunch of excess requests, you will process less per user, and thus reach the same level of scale on a less efficient stack.
The most important part is people paying you money.
Modern startup culture is full of inefficiencies + silly trappings (nice offices, drive to hire people, make things more complex, take more money from investors to stave off figuring out taking money from customers)
100%. Shameless Plug - In fact, I'm currently building an "inefficient," "micro" web framework specifically so I can build more stuff, more quickly [1].
An entire app can be build in a single js file (with only one dependency... and it's 150 or so dependencies and sub dependencies).
Interesting but the way you phrased it, doesn’t sell it particularly well - it seems to simply hide the underlying dependency complexity a few layers below. It’s still a node.js app with all the pros and cons of npm etc.
Surprising and noteworthy are not the same thing, but pretending they are definitely lets you make your non-sequitur reply seem like it addresses mine...
It's noteworthy when tech projects are successful and simple, because in the industry there is a widespread tendency to try and replicate what "the big guys" are doing, and often times what they're doing is extremely convoluted.
In other words, it is significant when projects buck this trend, because it goes against the mistaken belief that the only way to be "web scale" to replicate some of the most complicated tech stacks out there, making it worth calling out. Significant being a synonym for noteworthy in case that needs to be clarified...
HN being an example of this doesn't somehow make every other example not noteworthy either if that was what you tried to say?
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This concept has come up so many times I am, again, surprised anyone who is in the same tech industry as me does not realize it's a thing:
Especially on Hacker News, a place where an immense amount of gnashing of teeth has happened over what the latest complicated tech stack that people convince themselves they need to make software that scales.
The fact that I keep reading posts on HN about how successful HN is makes me wonder how soon will this forum die off, infested by cultist "contrarians", wanna be philosophers and alt right fantasists, in favour of reddit - where most of the times I read either the exact same comments as here on identical posts, or better quality comments with far more evidence and without the usual non sense downvoting of dissent.
But to the point specifically, " It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack." - you are spot on. The "successful" HN crowd appears to favour overengineering or obscure tools, point which shows 90% are armchair philosophers who daydream of running a business, building a 0 to 1 start-up, and other things office workers imagine when they think building a webapp using GO, or Haskell will result in anything else but a line on a CV for yet another slave away job (potentially an open source project that no one wants too).
