Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?

16 points by jonathan-kosgei 3 years ago | 9 comments

I've always been impressed by Discord's engineering culture and think they made most of the right decisions regarding their tech stack.

What other startups got their tech stack right?

ayushgp 3 years ago |

Zerodha. They are the biggest stock broker in India with a team of less than 40 people. Check out their tech blog for their tech philosophy: https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/

Also, WhatsApp with their choice of Erlang. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...

atmosx 3 years ago | |

The zerodha post is ... hard to believe. Self managed _everything_ and one devops engineer, no SREs? Who's managing the self-hosted PostgreSQL instances with the hundreds of billions or rows of _financial_ data?

dominotw 3 years ago |

Early 2010 startups like github, groupon, shopify, gitlab for using Ruby on Rails to get off the ground and scale.

dpeck 3 years ago |

WhatsApp. Rick Reed’s “That’s Billion with a B” presentation is a good glimpse into their own view of it https://youtu.be/c12cYAUTXXs

giraffe_lady 3 years ago |

Slack using php.

Most people recoil from it but their reasons were sound and they played well off its strengths and planned for and mitigated its weaknesses.

infamouscow 3 years ago | |

A lot can be said for having an engineering team with the experience and maturity to recognize both strengths and weaknesses of their technology choices.

actually_a_dog 3 years ago | |

What were their reasons?

giraffe_lady 3 years ago | | |

They wrote a blog post about it but it's been a few years since I read it. IIRC it centered on the inherently stateless request model and how that interacts with the way they wanted to do concurrency.

kephasp 3 years ago | | |

https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/