| HN Mirror

"... wanted to bootstrap a business by optimizing costs" -- The famous quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil" comes to mind. :-) As a fellow tech entrepreneur, thinking long and hard about my planned startup's technology stack, I was also guilty of initially leaning toward a scalable, safe, enterprise-y and fancy, but less mature, stacks, like C# on .NET Core and Julia, correspondingly. However, upon my extensive research and thinking, I'm now leaning toward using Python and Flask for API-focused backend and Vue for frontend. After all, unless you're the next Google (or, at least, Dropbox), costs of your infrastructure would be negligible compared to business costs associated with people (due to salaries) and lost time-to-market advantage (due to higher complexity and learning curve). Should a startup become wildly successful and scale-driven cost optimization would become an issue, it most likely would make much more sense from the strategy perspective to ask a team to rewrite the platform(s) - or, rather, its relevant performance-critical parts - into a highly-performant language, like Rust. Having said that, I still think that the containerized applications (not necessarily microservices!) approach might be preferable, despite corresponding increase in extra complexity, learning curve, efforts and costs, because IMO the above-mentioned extras are less significant (and, thus, more affordable for a bootstrapping startup) than those associated with attempting to use new to founders or relevant team or not mature enough language and corresponding technology stack.