Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

Hiring a contractor is a good idea, but make sure they are hired with the potential to become a technical cofounder.

My suggestion would be to hire someone who can rewrite the PHP code into something more maintainable like Javascript, Ruby, or Python. And make sure they have a plan for scalable infrastructure (either via a PaaS like Heroku/App Engine or if they have the chops, a real DevOps infrastructure).

View on HN

Suggesting a code rewrite w/o any idea of what the code looks like or what the issues are is pretty awful.

PHP is a good solution for plenty of projects out there. There are plenty of high revenue operations that run on PHP. Like any other language it just needs to be well coded and maintained.

What's needed here is looking at the current state of the system, detecting obvious issues and determining the course of action based on that + expected growth.

What possible advantage would "real" devops infrastructure provide? Unless you're doing something so far out if the ordinary (or infrastructure is your advantage) there is zero value in building your own early on. You're suggesting they find a CTO/architect/php developer, all in one... That's not reality.

In a big comanies all three roles need a very different skill set, because of politics, splitting saying and doing and so on. In a start up environments skills needed for all three roles are very similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com