This is a great idea. In general, I think there's great potential in anything that connects developers with other developers to provide reviews of software.
Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year. There was no information. I'm sure these API's have been used thousands of times, but developer has written a review. So I'm left making decisions off marketing pages and PR-driven blog entries. Implementation takes hours that I don't have, I just want a trusted review.
Not really. At least e-commerce has a pretty capable incumbent (Shopify).
CMS is an interesting case, though. There are 4-5 companies trying to take on WordPress. I could go with the incumbent, but I'd love -- LOVE -- some real dev reviews of that stuff.
Like, where's the fucking unboxing video for developer software?
The top three ecommerce platforms are all Java based (hybris, Oracle ATG and IBM Websphere) and there are a ton of "tier 2" platforms that are cover the .net and PHP stacks.
The tier 1 systems will cost you a significant amount of money to get up and running though (over a million $ is not uncommon).
If you only know of the PHP platforms then I guess you don't play at any significant level in the industry (like most people on HN).
Only in software industry do we still fee this way! For e.g. Can we imagine a car delivered to us without involvement of any third party components?
Why do we feel software always has to be built from scratch or use free (open?) stuff? What is wrong in software being built on credible third party services?
Perhaps the sign of a mature industry is when such credible third party partnerships become the norm...
I reckon the main issue is reliability. In your example of car delivery, if one driver is unavailable, there's gonna be a replacement. You could argue that if one datacenter goes down there'll be another, but those too can fail - see also the Amazon outage last year or whenever it was. And unlike a car delivery, these 3rd party suppliers (like AWS) will severely impact your business if they fail.
Of course, so would a power outage. So IDK, there's pros and cons, as with everything.
My analogy was to depict a car company and not a single individual's car. As in software company using third party services has the same business risks as a car company using third party services.
My view point was not from a single individual using the product but from the manufacturers view point.
Personally I'd be more wary of startups that have few external dependencies, because it likely means their trying to do too much that is outside of their core competencies and/or not spending as much time as they could be on their unique value proposition.
Sure you can run your own centralized git hosting for your team. Do you really think you could do it better and more reliably than GitHub? Especially for less than $7/mo? And sure you can probably run your own instance of postgres, but how confident are you that your backups are going to be there when you need them? And that it'll be up as much as a dedicated instance of Heroku Postgres? I can probably count the number of people more experienced and qualified than that team (wrt running Postgres) on my fingers and none of them are going to run your database for $50/mo.
Thank you for creating this site! I am a Computer (Software) Engineering student and love to develop web applications in my free time. I am always looking to further my skillset and it seems this will prove really useful in understanding the choice of infrastructure/tools/languages by large companies.
Can anyone recommend any resources to better understand the interaction between the aforementioned choices (e.g. why would one company prefer a certain combination of language and infrastructure over a different combination)?
If you go to an individual company's page, you'll see references which may include a post/article about why they chose x over y. Tumblr's tech stack page (http://stackshare.io/tumblr/tumblr) has an article about why they chose Scala over other options and it's pretty neat.
Interesting site. A valuable tool for startups and developers looking to expand their toolset.
Please make a shortcut for "I use this", so we can add technologies without navigating to their individual pages. I added 10 technologies off the top of my head but I keep being reminded of other ones I use and adding them involves a lot of clicking and back and forth.
Thanks for the feedback, will do! Currently, you have to add them to a stack or contribute/vote on content on their page. We'll definitely look into making that easier.
This is great! I like being able to see so many different Utilities and DevOps tools being used. But it seems like many of the top stacks don't mention the application frameworks or languages that they're using. Why might that be the case?
This is neat. One thing, would it be possible to show "verified" accounts? Meaning if someone puts up the stack that Twitter uses, how do I know for sure this isn't someone's guess and someone at Twitter actually posted it?
Yes! That has been a requested feature for quite some time so we added it: http://stackshare.io/parse/parse (more here: http://stackshare.io/stacks). A lot of the non-verified stacks have citations, so even if someone didn't post their stack you can see where the info came from.
I don't understand what is up with your site - this and the old LeanStack - but when I have Ghostery enabled I'm completely unable to click buttons. Mind taking a look at it maybe?
I also have this problem and I don't even use Ghostery. Just plain vanilla Firefox 32.0.3 on Windows 7 with Cookie Monster and AdBlock Plus.
Went so far as to allow cookies because that fouls up a lot of sites and this looks really interesting, but still no dice. I'll see if updating to 33.0.2 helps.
EDIT: Nope. Clicking any button still has no effect.
OK, guys, if you are watching me using your site then could you PLEASE announce that in a very big red block on the landing page or in a way that cookies are announced on many sites nowadays?
You should accept that usage monitoring is an inacceptable privacy invasion for many people nowadays and we would like to be informed about that kind of monitoring before using a site, so we can decide if we like it or not.
Very cool! Right this morning I was looking at who's using django+mysql.
Can I ask you how accurate is the data and if/when it's "certified" from the source? From my morning search I found pinterest and rdio using both django and mysql, but this is not reflected in StackShare (missing mysql for pinterest, missing both django, mysql for rdio -- again, I'm not sure about my results, it's just a coincidence that I was searching that).
Thanks! Some stacks have more info than others for sure. The quality of the data will get better as more companies claim their pages and verify their stack (e.g. http://stackshare.io/mailgun/mailgun). For stacks that are not verified, we're inviting users to be community moderators and contributors to these pages to beef up the citations :)
Glad you asked! We started off filling it out for the popular startups, which eventually created the desire for others to join in and do it themselves (hence the rebranding from Leanstack.io to StackShare).
Regarding your suggestion, every page has this tab: http://stackshare.io/stackshare/stackshare/details. This feature was released today so not many stacks have the details just yet. But we'll be highlighting companies every week and having them fill this out, so stay tuned! Also, feel free to share your stack :)
I'm interested in the 'business' aspect of this site.
How do you plan to make profit ?
How can you make people come back to the site when the stacks don't change that quickly ?
Dammit this was one of my startup ideas...oh well. Nice work btw. It might be interesting to group companies by industry. Considering I work in education, I would want to know what LMSs and CRMs are used by educational institutes for example.
Which raises another thought: wouldn't some organizations want to keep their stack secret from competitors, since a mature stack is usually the result of years of experienced decision-making.
Nice, I've been using http://www.slant.co for this sort of thing. Different stacks and commentary from folks on plusses and minuses. The rating system is nice but the question I'm always trying to answer is "Can I solve problem X with Stack Y?"
Leanstack.io was extremely useful for discovering services. Needed best A/B testing tools? I used to go to Leanstack. I don't seem to find any reason to visit Stackshare. I don't really care whether Twitter uses Zendesk or Freshdesk.
StackShare has even more tools and services than Leanstack did, with more ways to discover them. Perhaps our messaging needs some work. StackShare is still very much about finding the best tools: http://stackshare.io/mobile-a-b-testing. Would love to hear your feedback, shoot me an email if you're up for it: yonas [at] stackshare.io.
EDIT: Just noticed you're behind Virtkick. Funny enough we just listed you last night: http://stackshare.io/virtkick
I found the reason to visit Stackshare real quick. I just checked today's Analytics of my startup https://www.virtkick.io - 20% visits originates from stackshare, so I now have to claim it. ;) Quite funny, I tell ya.
It doesn't change the main concern, though. leanstack.io was the greatest site to find services.
Cool idea, but there seem to be a few duplicates for Java. When I search 'Java', I see 3-4 duplicate results, only the first one has any companies listed, and the rest seem to be empty?
I've also been finding it useful to identify companies for product validation testing by seeing who uses various underlying components that are within my core demographic, combined with LinkedIn/moves.io to find someone to speak to.
When did it not? I've been interviewing people for the past few weeks asking them about their stack and they all invariably say at one point "running on (aws|heroku|azure)". The [PaaS wiki entry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service) itself says it's providing a "solution stack" as a service.
Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year. There was no information. I'm sure these API's have been used thousands of times, but developer has written a review. So I'm left making decisions off marketing pages and PR-driven blog entries. Implementation takes hours that I don't have, I just want a trusted review.
It's really dry territory. You can do well here.