3 things I learned about choosing technologies for startups

3 things I learned about choosing technologies for startups

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Published October 24, 2022
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First…Can this post be read by a non-technical?Choose ones with the biggest communityPopular means speedy implementationAn example for frontend frameworks..Other frameworksPopular technologies enables you to hire faster and easierStart with a boilerplate code
 
Choosing technologies are hard, especially in crowded market where new technologies and frameworks come up everyday. I personally feel the great pain while choosing between frameworks, learned it the hard it way (try a bunch of different technologies back-and-forth), and condense the wisdom into this single post.

First…

This post is for..
This post is not for..
New startup or projects teams that experience decision fatigue while stumbling upon multiple technologies
Technical teams that have strong conviction to using a specific technology, and only by using which can they build their initiatives
Teams that are looking large candidate poor and an easy process for hiring new members to onboard their team in the future
Teams that are looking for a very small subset of developers that specialize in certain technologies to solve specific problems

Can this post be read by a non-technical?

Yes absolutely! I write this post with the design for non-technical readers in mind, those are in the business spectrums that want to validate technologies for early stages startup without depending too much on the technical teams.

Choose ones with the biggest community

Choosing the most popular technology is just a no brainer but at the same being the proven method.

Popular means speedy implementation

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The word “speed” can be misleading sometimes. Some recent technologies are introduced to have a very high-level development interface, enabling developers to build stuffs in record time with few just lines of code, only ending up paying the cost for:
  • not having big enough community to ask for a specific issue
  • indefinite amount of time spending on fixing bugs
  • lose customers, tractions, and money
Popular and timely technologies though don’t have glitz-and-glamour that offers in more youthful frameworks, they passed the test of time and have an enormous community to back you up when you need, hence you accelerate your development process can without any frictions.

An example for frontend frameworks

If you kinda look at the web framework landscape in 2022, you’ll be very much overwhelmed the number of options of web frameworks available on the market: React, Vue, Svelte, Astro, Gatsby, NextJS, VueJS, yadiyadiyay.. which can make you completely confused.
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But if you look carefully, the most popular framework are .. pretty obvious. There’s just few of them:
  • Meta framework: NextJS, NuxtJs.
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If you’re in a decision fatigue situation, the most popular framework like React or Vue should be on the top of your mind. Then you slowly move to their meta frameworks like NextJS (for React) and NuxtJS (for Vue) in case want to have some capability in static site generation (SSG), or server side rendering (SSR), etc.

..Other frameworks

I think you get the point, either you’re building blockchain or AI, stick with the most popular frameworks. It helps you build fast in record time and also sustain in the long run.

Popular technologies enables you to hire faster and easier

The other aspect that’s very important but is often times underlooked while choosing a technology is that: well-known technologies ease the hiring process.
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The time you choose a popular framework (like “React”) as your framework, you instantly get access to the large pool of candidates who develop on these frameworks. The “popularity” also relative to the location you want to hire, say in the US, React and Angular were the most popular . However, that’s not the case for Angular for my country, Vietnam. In China, Vue might be a better choice since a majority of documentation are in chinese.

Start with a boilerplate code

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The smartest way is never to build anything from scratch. Usually, popular frameworks has already been used by tons of developers on tons of projects, it’s high chance that you have template project (or boilerplate) somewhere on Github.
 
These boilerplate contains some commonly used modules and code organization that embraces the best practice in the industry that you can just follow and focus on building instead of worrying about setting up the project too much.
Some examples of a boilerplate: