I Want My StackExchange

September 18th, 2009 by Brandon Watson

What does a guy have to do to get his StackExhange site set up and running? I put my submission in a while back, but I am probably way down on the list. So in a creative attempt to convince Joel and Jeff that I am worthy, I figured I would give them something to read. I spent this past week at the TechCrunch50 conference listening to developers talk about why they don’t use the Microsoft stack. It was a great set of conversations, but I also spent a good bit of time talking with some of the business guys. Many similar topics of concern came up over and over again, and I really want to help solve those problems. Q&A for founder types anyone? Let’s get this thing started already. I will be a tireless promoter, and I can bring a pretty powerful ally to the table in making sure the site is funded and gets promoted. Jeff, Joel, I beg you…please get my site rolled.

Posted in Entrepreneurs

Ryan

So hows this coming along? I'm a developer working on a startup that is based on an MS stack. It does feel a bit lonely at times. I'm looking forward to hear about this rumored "top objections to .NET" you mentioned.

brandonwatson

Mike -

While StackOverflow is a community based on programming questions, what I am proposing is a community based on all the business end questions entrepreneurs and small businesses have.

As for the top objections to .NET, you will have to wait for the report out coming soon. :)

Mike Leach

I personally don't see it as a ".NET vs the world" issue. Many ground-floor architectural decisions are coming down to:

1) static vs. dynamic typing
Both .NET and Enterprise Java are losing ground here. Having to recompile and drop a DLL in the bin directory (or JAR file) is no way to run a high availability website.

2) SQL vs file system persistence
Both MS and Oracle are losing ground due to the frustrating lack of parity between object oriented development and relational persistence (ORM is just a workaround. Rails development is losing ground too).

The resurgence of functional programming in Javascript (for AJAX apps) dramatically decouples programming language from persistence layer.

3) hosting options
Amazon EC2 has set some precedent with pricing LAMP and Windows stacks separately ($0.02 more per hour for Windows). Patch Tuesdays are killing Win hosted sites. Even stripped down web or SMTP role servers need to bounce too often.

4) IDE performance
VS.NET and Eclipse just run too slow, even on 3GHz machines with 4GB RAM. Intellisense auto-complete is the only thing keeping IDE relevant.

brandonwatson

Mike, that's great feedback...can you go a little deeper on #2? What do you want here? What would be ideal?

Mike Leach

I'm doing quite a but of "unlearning" regarding persistence layer in web apps. But viable options emerging include:
CouchDB
Serialized JSON files
MemcacheD
Object oriented databases

Google GFS and BigTable come up quite a bit in discussions.

Salesforce.com's Database-as-a-Service and metadata API are a useful data modeling environment for 80% of web apps.

Mike Leach

I rely on StackExchange for several .NET/JQuery related questions today. Are you proposing something different?

What were the top objections to using .NET in start-ups today?

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