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Ask HN: Technical skills helpful for building a startup today

48 pointsmannymanman54 comments

I have recently developed a keen interest in coding and technology in general. I was suggested by a friend to go through Harvard's CS50, which I did, and now have a decent understanding of some basic data structures and algorithms. Now I want to learn more skills that will help me build projects independently from start to finish, and eventually create my own startup.

Since this is YC's official forum, I figured that folks here could give me solid advice on what technologies I should learn to start a startup. I have a vague idea that knowledge about web dev (React, Javascript etc.) and cloud (AWS) is in high demand in industry, but are they the first things I should pick up? What about mobile apps? And blockchain? Where should I start? What area is the easiest to pick up and has the most resources online?

Thanks!

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If you actually want generalist web dev skills applicable to almost any web startup, learn Rails. There are tons of resources, and the Rails 1st party docs are a good starting point. Rails will set you up to learn SQL modeling, MVC pattern, CRUD basics, api design, etc without putting you into library selection paralysis which happens quite a bit in the JavaScript ecosystem, and you can replicate the architecture easily in Express/Node if you need to later. So, it’s a “paved road” towards familiarity / mastery of web development where there’s always a clear next step and obvious choices to accomplish your goals. Ruby isn’t too “hot” any more these days but it will massively simplify your decision tree. The JS ecosystem still has nothing to match the productivity of Rails.

AWS/GCP are tools to achieve some goal. It’s hard to suggest learning those until you have some kind of app that has needs served by a cloud provider.

Blockchain is something of a meme. No startup has succeeded in the “blockchain” space other than in “selling shovels in the goldrush” sense.

(Native) mobile app development is somewhat involved, plus there’s 2x as much to learn because there’s two different mobile platforms. I wouldn’t suggest investing time there as your first area. I found it quite impenetrable until I had a chance to learn it in a work context.

I agree with this - I did udacity's original cs101 (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs101/), then cs253 on web apps, taught by Steve huffman, the co-founder of reddit. Then when my co-founder and I decided to work on our first startup, we decided Rails was the best option for noobs like us, and it probably took us just a few weeks to learn the basics of rails because we'd already completed cs253, I think it might have been harder if we had tried to learn it straight away. But rails was enough for us to build a telemedicine web app, and it wasn't until around 6 months later when our view was starting to turn into a mass of jQuery spaghetti that we started to learn and apply react. jQuery is great for doing simple user interactions in the browser, but as you try and build more complicated functionality, react is a much better tool for the job.

I agree about staying away from mobile to start with if at all possible at the beginning.

No rush, but sometime after or while learning rails, definitely take a look at the book "beginning database design" by Claire Churcher. It's the best book I've ever seen to learn how to design your database schema for a sql database. But you don't need it until you've at least made a few web applications, and like my experience with react, the best time is when you are trying to figure out what format to store all your data, and finding it too complex - that book gives you a great way of thinking about the problem that simplifies things greatly.

As a dilettante Rails amateur, I can also vouch for Rails in general compared to JS-based stacks. Having tried React ('cause it's trendy), I still feel like it's nowhere near Rails to create simple CRUD apps.

Thanks for the SQL recommendation — that's something I've personally struggled with in trying to move up from noob to intermediate.

Modelling things properly seems to be one step on the ladder that the Rails doc won't cover in sufficient depth, even though the tool provides simple ways of doing the task once you understand what you're doing.

I'd agree with this idea, but Rails isn't the only game in town. Laravel has huge market share, and livewire + alpinejs is an awesome stack.

But there's also django if python is more your style. I like rails, just saying for quick projects I'd advise people to look into each of the 3 big frameworks (laravel, django, rails), maybe try out a demo of each and code a little to see which you like better.

Laravel's new jetstream starter is amazing as it creates an entire SaaS app in a few commands. Compared with Rails where devise/authentication is a diy solution, sure it's pretty straight forward, but having auth at it's core gives laravel a leg up over rails. Also caching, queues, mail, there's a lot of niceties built into laravel that rails needs 3rd party packages for, albeit there's also tons of laravel packages.

I recommend packalyst.org or larablocks.com to discover the best packages to use and that are currently being supported.

I would strongly encourage you not to dive into learning React or AWS. Both are very good to learn about if your goal is to become an employee at a tech company, but not so much for a solo founder.

React itself is fine and relatively straight-forward, but its ecosystem is massive and there are many competing options for several accompanying libraries. AWS includes a powerful array of services, but it's considerably more time-consuming to learn than other hosting options such as Render.com.

I'd say your best bet is to just use an MVC-ish back-end framework and sprinkles of JavaScript. Once you've done well enough to hire a few engineers, then maybe start thinking about React, AWS, more complex devops, etc.

At the beginning, the most important thing is speed.

Strong disagree on not learning AWS (or another cloud provider). I was partial to AWS even before I worked for them, but chances are you're going to run your startup in the cloud. For that, you should know at least the basics of the cloud you're going to use.

I'm not saying learn CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, or any of the hardcore DevOps stuff you'll be interested in once you start to scale.

But you need to know how security works (i.e. IAM), how to build networking infrastructure (i.e. VPC), how to deploy servers and databases (i.e. EC2 and RDS/DynamoDB). And, of course, how to do things cost-effectively.

If you don't take the time to learn the cloud, you're going to be stuck when it's time to push your project into production. So you're going to need to:

1.) Hire a cloud architect. This isn't cheap nor is it a good solution. If you ever part ways with your cloud architect, you're going to be starting step one all over again. Except now you have to learn how the cloud works and how your environment was architected. And that's assuming your architect doesn't maliciously make a mess of things on the way out (which happens -- A LOT).

2.) Open a support ticket for every little issue you run across. This can easily become a blocker with deployment. Not to mention you're likely going to have a developer support plan. Which means you get email-only support and the replying support engineer may not even be in your timezone.

So not only do you have to deal with the inefficiency of back-and-forth email conversations, you may have to deal with the time lag based on the engineer who works on your case.

Alternatively, if I were starting a business tomorrow, I'd start out with Heroku or a normal VPS (Linode) depending on the budget and requirements, and only switch to AWS when it made economic sense to invest in that setup.

This is a fair way to go about it. Really, my point is that you're likely to use the cloud.

And if you're running a small/solo shop, you really need to learn the basics of that cloud vendor before rolling out on the cloud platform. I see too many people roll things out on AWS without any knowledge of the platform whatsoever.

Do you have advice on learning AWS/cloud for people that don't know anything about it? I have a Django/React project I'm hacking on where everything runs locally, but I don't understand how to put this thing on the real internet.

I suggest getting a subscription to ACloudGuru or Cloud Academy. I'm more partial to Cloud Academy these days. They're both about $50 a month.

Then go through the Certified Cloud Practitioner course. That will give you the very basics.

Once you're done with the CCP, you can move to the Solutions Architect Associate course. You don't have to get the certs (although they are useful). But the courses will give you a good understanding of AWS.

Just to be clear, that's about 50 hours of content. But I suggest being over-prepared rather than under-prepared.

acloudguru.com cloudacademy.com

Very cool, I will check this out. Thanks!

If you're solo or intending to stay small, I'd strongly recommend just using a PaaS that works at a higher level of abstraction than AWS. Heroku is still around, will give you sane defaults without really knowing much about the devops world at all, and will scale well enough that you'll almost certainly have a much bigger team prior to needing to move to something more complex.

Disagree on AWS. It's not that hard, and if you're gonna spend any amount of time figuring some vendor locked cloud system (which they all are), AWS is the best bet. And you obviously need to be careful with using every service that company throws at you, but barring that they provide the most solid reliable suite of services you can hope for so you spend more time on logic and business after some initial time investment.

No AWS _is_ hard. It's hard. They're all hard. They require tons and tons of knowledge before understanding what to look at, how to use it, when to use it, etc. Everyone who thinks these systems are simple completely take for granted the years and years of knowledge they've acquired. Even in the form of shared vocabulary, AWS is insane. IAM is a whole other nightmare of complexity that is insanely powerful, but I wouldn't dare point anyone in that direction if they were just starting out.

I’ve found AWS services individually to be straightforward but the UI is full of unintuitive menus so you always end up having to google “how to x on AWS”. Also understanding how to make the services interact takes a fairly high level of networking knowledge.

I dunno about that. AWS is useful at a certain point, but I must say, if I want to spin up a prototype that I need to get into production ASAP with no pre-existing infra, the first tool I reach for is Heroku. It's hard to beat how clean the UX is. Why? It's opinionated. I get an instance of an RDBMS and my service. It's really easy to install Heroku apps. It doesn't make me learn unrelated abstractions to do that, or fill my life with pointless noise and bullshit.

I will always appreciate AWS for how I can rely on it in production, but it definitely require a lot more verbosity and configuration than it needs to. I wish we would remember the product design lessons DHH taught us. Convention is preferable to configuration when possible for a reason. It reduces unnecessary complexity. It makes it easier for your brain to work with.

The option I suggested, Render, is essentially the new Heroku. It's focused on dev experience, run by ex-Stripe people who worked on their infra and it's much less expensive than Heroku has been post-acquisition.

If you want something managed that requires minimal time worrying about infra, they're a great choice. For something that truly requires low costs per user, I wouldn't use them but they make a ton of sense for many projects.

And to be fair, AWS also has some serious limitations in terms of price scalability compared to a VPS like Digital Ocean or Linode: https://questinglog.com/costs-are-part-of-scalability/#just-...

I think you are comparing apples and oranges. Heroku is great not just because of its DX, but 1) because it's a subsidiary of Salesforce and I know it won't disappear tomorrow and 2) it has a thriving app ecosystem. It's a real stretch to compare a recent $2.25M seed funded upstart with it and borderline malpractice to suggest running your production workloads on it.

With AWS although you have to pay the premium on egress, you don't pay that until you leave their sandbox; what's more, you can add links into your VPC that sidestep it. If you're just running open source software or a kubes cluster on commodity boxes and you're fine owning all of your operational burden, sure. Use whatever you like. But if you want reliability and good DX, your options get narrower.

Personally, I think that AWS Code Suite and VS/Azure spaces (and GitHub spaces by proxy) are going to be the real challengers in this space. There is a real UX problem to solve but it doesn't mean I want to necessarily use a different platform.

We have almost exactly opposite opinions. I would have recommended Heroku back in 2012 without question. I would not now.

If Render is good enough for Stripe's production workloads, then it's good enough for mine.

Look, I'm not saying I doubt that. If the tool fits your needs, more power to you. But that won't be the case for everyone. Eventually, some firms need to reach for the power tools that AWS has, or simply the reach in terms of reliability. Things like SQS, Aurora, Sagemaker, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, Redshift, S3, Glacier, Lambda, Fargate, availability zone reach, raw EC2 + EBS.

It's about ecosystems. Heroku has a decent ecosystem, but nowhere near AWS or Azure. I find it far more likely that AWS and/or Azure will improve their ecosystems to attain parity with the gold standard Heroku (or Render for you) DX in the small but which can scale all the way up. But you may find that a tall tale, and if so I would understand. The track record on the AWS/Azure side isn't great. But the latter did acquire GitHub, and I fully expect them to exploit that. I would be surprised if AWS lets them 1-up their incumbency through that vector without neutralizing it.

> At the beginning, the most important thing is speed.

Specifically, speed of development

Do you suggest investing time in frameworks like Django or Rails

You have thrown out quite the list there (Blockchain/AWS/etc), which I guess is more of an indictment of where we're at an industry today regarding tools, than any criticism on your part.

If you are truly starting out fresh/green, I would ignore all the buzzwords, and simply focus on how to make a solid, good 'ol fashioned web app.

For this I would suggest learning/reading up on the Django Framework. The docs are excellent, kind to newcomers, and will walk you through all the main architectural considerations and components needed to make a robust fully featured app - databases/orm, controllers, templating etc.etc.

Once you've built a (few) webapps like this then you can worry about spending time refactoring parts of it with the new hotness. They will reveal themselves to you once you get some experience and grow your app/business, and you'll have the knowledge to make better decisions on whether or not they're worth it.

For now just stick with a framework that will guide you; ofc it doesn't have to be Django, there is Ruby on Rails and many others, and remember even the first iteration of Instagram was a Django app!

Rambling while I drink my coffee:

Tech stack: React + Nextjs (react-query, graphql-generate, typescript), Django (admin panel, celery for background tasks, channels, graphql), Postgres, Redis (for celery and websockets). Postgres in RDS with auto rotating secrets. Deploy as a Django as a Docker image on AWS. Access keys from Secrets Manager at runtime (this is your pre EKS setup). Deploy frontend app on Vercel. Use Stripes newest payments system for billings. Deploy everything via GitHub actions PRs and use Actions, including the new code and dependency checks.

Bam you’ve got a frontend with a busting cache, websockets for automatic updates, ability to do server side rendering, and all the content management systems from the Django admin panel you would have setup by hand with Express/Flask. You can choose to use any method of auth that Django provides or go with Auth0.

Using graphql-generate and Django Graphene you can auto generate your typescript SDK on your frontend. All you have to worry about now is your view code and your models structure.

Using celery and celery-beat will allow you to do long running or scheduled tasks. Connect it with Django channels and push updates from a celery worker to the frontend.

GitHub will keep it up to date and check for security errors with automatic pull requests.

Expansions on this architecture include: - switching to EKS (useful especially for secrets and scale) - Infra as code via Pulumi to switch to any K8s provider - Using RabbitMQ for more robust messages passing over simple Redis queue

I would encourage you to put the idea of building a startup aside and just learn / have fun building things with no business utility first.

1. It sounds like you're already really curious so you've got your number one skill taken care of. If you're looking for a curriculum, start with something you're interested in and find the fastest, tightest feedback loop. Basically you want to be able to make something that activates all the reward centres in your brain or build it in small increments so you stay engaged. That might be learning how to write 3d graphics, build a website, basic javascript, etc. Find the smallest piece and just learn that.

2. Don't worry about doing everything "the right way". The whole point here is to try something, get a feeling for it, and then figure out how to make it better, how to write it differently, etc. You're going to end up realizing that one persons "best practices" are better than other peoples "best practices" and where you can make trade-offs (no1 skill imo)

3. As far as things to learn, that list is never ending. Just learn whatever you need to accomplish your goal.

Stay away from "blockchain" or "crypto"! First, the blockchain use cases are few and far between. Illegal "darknet" markets selling drugs are the biggest use case of the biggest blockchain, Bitcoin. Distributed blockchains just doesn't make sense for most computational problems, and "blockchain" becomes the solution not for technical, but for marketing or legal reasons.

Next, the strategies to make money off blockchains usually involve selling a mis-understood product to the next greater fool, and the blockchain industry has a really sketchy history of using pump and dump schemes to make money while leaving purchasers with useless products.

Finally, I believe there is now a shift in opinion against blockchain: After the huge investments of late 2018/2018, a number of well known folks in tech have spoken out against blockchain. Right now, there are still a lot of people holding the bag, so to speak, including a lot VCs from 2018. I believe, based on the performance of blockchain companies and new regulation, that there won't be many new blockchain/crypto companies, although you never know.

That said, the underlying technology that makes blockchain work is worth study in it's own right, and has industry applications: Distributed systems, databases, distributed consensus, cryptography, byzantine generals problem, et cetera.

I think I am qualified to answer this question. When I started my own company (running for 3 years now), I was already writing code for 5 years but that was not web stuff. I was mostly writing wireless communication protocol(firmware). Then i decided to build a SaaS product. I started with Django and i would recommend that to anyone simply because it comes batteries included. The documentation and whole ecosystem of django/python is great. Also it is used by many large companies in production so you can go a long long way with django itself.

For apps i would recommend Flutter. It's great, one code base for ios/android. Compared to react, i think flutter is easier as you dont have to deal with CSS/HTML etc.

Regarding hosting, start with heroku. It's super easy, does the right things for you out of the box. Security of something you need to do right from day 0 and with doing AWS/GCP yourself, you may be better off getting heroku to take care of this for you instead of doing yourself.

Technologies are tools. Figure out who your customer is and what problem you're trying to solve, and then look for suggestions for the right tool to solve that problem.

Because I think you are on the wrong scent, I recommend looking at Startup School https://www.startupschool.org/ and also reading some of Graham's essays to get a better sense about building a startup. http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

Use glitch.me to build a personal website which will teach yourself how to code and will teach you not only the basics but also what is involved in basic web development. Focus on HTML and CSS.

Mobile apps have a higher barrier to entry and you should focus making your personal website responsive so that you can design for screens.

Add a blog to your personal website and when you have to learn something first learn it and then write it down. Learn JavaScript at this point to automate the creation of blog posts.

Once you believe you know enough to make a project that you can do make a prototype on https://glitch.me and move to the paid tier. Then name the project and buy a domain from google / AWS . Then learn about authentication.

If you want to be a solo/technical founder, I'd consider learning to build web apps a great first step - it's accessible, cross-platform, and flexible. There's also no shortage of resources online. On the frontend, React is commonly used and generally a safe choice. On the backend, some nodejs with heroku or docker should give you a gentle introduction (with the added advantage that you'll be learning the same language for both front and backend -- one less thing to worry about as you're starting).

Thanks! Do you have any suggested tutorials that are particularly easy to follow?

I really liked Andrew mead's javascript course, and his react course. They are both on o'reilly learning, so you might have access to that through a local library etc

Check Wes Boss's videos on Js node and React.Some of them are free, some are paid.

Learn about building a company, product market fit etc. and start using no-code or low-code tools. Get traction, then get really good at finding a tech co-founder.

I think it's probably easier to find a good tech co-founder nowadays than spending 50+ hours a week learning how to code. There are so many ways a startup can fall apart even if you know how to code!

(I'm a tech co-founder, and for better or worse, I spend more time building relationships, sending emails and business models and planning than writing code)

If your goal is to create your own startup, the technology doesn't really matter. Unless your startup is a "mobile app", then that is also not important today. As with most suggestions here, your best bet is to start with web dev (like you have mentioned) but don't get sucked into the hype. You could do a lot with Rails or PHP (this gives you a solid understanding of some foundational stuff)

- Internet: Domain names + DNS + Hosting (VPS is enough)

- Web Dev + Backend: Nginx (web server) + PHP-FPM (PHP) OR Unicorn (Rails)

- Database: You will need SQL no matter what other people tell you

- Front end: HTML, CSS (Bootstrap), Javascript (jQuery)

These are the most "boring" things you can learn but you won't spend weeks just getting your environment going and you are already frustrated. All the cool stuff deals with async, PWA, SPA, NoSQL, (... insert more buzzwords here ...) that will just confuse you before you even get a login page up and running.

Your goal is to be able to create a functioning "web application" that may already exist so you can just "borrower" the features and not have to think too hard if learning coding and technology is where you are at right now.

Learn Excel (Strongly Advised), Python for CRUD stuff, SQL for analytics (MySQL, Postgre, SQLite & DuckDB), Sysadmin Skills for basic VPSs (bash scripts included).

All of this is considered somewhat simple for seasoned technologists, but still takes a lot to be decent. If you grow you'll hire someone else so unless you're willing to spend 5+ years only to produce decent code, I'll say this is sufficient.

I'm a technical cofounder, and I've learned this the hard way. The two most often overlooked skills I lack are: Sales and Accounting.

The question is: What do you want to build? What problem do you want to solve?

If you don't know yet, then figure this out first. It is useless* to spend your time reading about how blockchain solutions on AWS work when you don't have a plan what to do next with this knowledge.

*) except if this interests you personally

I think your question is wrong. You don't ask of what you need to build a startup. You ask what tools do I need to solve the problem I discovered. A startup is just a company made to solve that issue and you can't pick a tool "for a startup".

I'd take a look at https://cushionapp.com/blog and https://cushionapp.com/running-costs/. He's posted on here a couple of times and has a setup that is very similar to what I'd roll with if I was going to bootstrap an app: React, Rails, and Heroku. People on here like to hate on the React ecosystem, but it's pretty straightforward if you stay on the paved path of create-react-app, react-router, redux-toolkit, and material-ui.

Focus on no-code, low-code approaches and tools to building a product to validate a problem and your solution to it.

For example, use a “no code” approach first and simply use tools to design or build a simple Product, from concept to creation. Use cloud services like Invision to create a prototype, website builders/template to validate need/interest in an idea. These are all things that anyone can pick up reasonably well without coding.

Essentially, what I’m saying is focus on non-technical skills related to ideation, proof of concept, product validation, etc.

Others have mentioned it depends on what problem you are trying to solve, but it also depends on your past experience and what you are already bringing to the table. E.g. If you are a recent high school grad, more CS fundamentals might be valuable. If you have experience from another industry, maybe you want to focus more on what the technologies you are considering will unlock in that industry, and look to a co-founder for some of the nitty gritty tech details. Where are you starting from?

I came here to say this: the domain is important here. Are trying to do web retail? then maybe you should just learn php and do Drupal. Are you trying to do a business that depends on some sort of data or analytics? Then python is probably the way to go. It all depends, and I would be very apprehensive to say "use X" without knowing the problem set.

Check out https://ycadvice.com, especially the Product and Technology sections.

I'd suggest Rails. You'll be able build a web app or an API. You'll learn about SQL. (Rails is a framework for web apps - which are generally useful to know about if you're not sure what you might do later). For deployment, I have had a great experience with Heroku, which is probably a bit easier than AWS. I'd suggest ignoring front-end frameworks like React for now - you can pick them up later, if your use case requires it. And you can probably get a decent MVP done without them. At the beginning you want to optimize for speed and simplicity, so that you can iterate quickly.

I agree w/others here that picking a good problem to solve is the MOST important (along with having a decent idea of how you might find customers) - and implementation/selection of technology less important. That said, when I was thinking of starting a company, I learned Rails first (I used DHH's Rails textbook)! For me, it was useful to learn web programming so that I could understand what web apps were even capable of doing. It's really helpful when you're picking a problem to work on to at least have a very vague general idea of how software might solve it! So for me at least, it helped inform & inspire our brainstorming/ideation discussions. And since we did end up using Rails to build our MVP, when my cofounders and I all quit our jobs to work full-time, we could start building right away.

This is a great question asked I just wanted to ask after reading most of the comments don’t we think starting with frameworks like react or vuejs since it would be easier to maintain the application since you can find many people who have JS skills compared to using Rails or Django

I’m just curious to know

Depends on what you want to build.

be very good with email

Satire or serious? I can’t tell.

Serious. Out of curiosity, what made this seem like satire? Don't want to give off that vibe in the future for serious posts

It’s because your Post contains a lot of meme-y buzzwords. But that’s not your failure, more a testament to tech news and articles posted these days.

This is hopefully the correct answer. In the tech community there are a lot of "shiny" buzzwords that can be very distracting to the larger concerns, and many developers (myself included) have developed large quantities disdain for them over the years.

For reference, when I see an otherwise "light" resume loaded up with a bunch of words like React, Node, Kubernetes, Docker, <any cloud product>, etc., I typically have an adverse physiological reaction and quickly move onto the next resume. Most of us are looking for substance in our work - meaningful value added towards the business or hobby interest being pursued.

That said, I am not against those who pursue learning of various shiny technologies as a hobby in and of itself, but I would caution those who are seeking higher orders of achievement to focus most of their energy on the core problems they are hoping to solve.

The buzzwords. And the apparent assumption that you can just “pick up” programming. Going from 0 (or CS50 online) to producing useful code will take several years at least. And as another person commented, idea, market, people, and execution make or break a startup, not programming languages or buzzwords such as blockchain.

Maybe find a technical co-founder who already has the technical expertise.

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