Tech-Stack
You have hardly any technical skills and you have to choose what technology will drive your product. How to go about this right? Don’t worry you don’t have to understand the technology, I will share how I sometimes choose new frameworks and how you can do some research yourself.
Hype alert!
Software world is full of “amazing new solutions” the mega-hype.
I don’t know where this comes from, if these are some nifty marketing strategies of companies delivering them, or great networking skills of developers behind them, but I avoid them. Unless they are amazing indeed.
Here are some of my general criteria:
- Good frameworks are well documented
- Good software has a community around it — how many stars does the code have on GitHub? How many downloads?
- Is the project active? How frequent are the updates?
- Finally, when was it first introduced?If it’s very new, chances are it will become irrelevant quickly.
Example: I focus on JavaScript and PHP (with Javascript becoming more increasingly relevant). These languages and therefore frameworks they power, have the biggest community, are best maintained and have the brightest future. That also means that it’s easier to find developers who use these languages!
Plugins & templates
Same rule apply for plugins and templates of all sorts. But they are best avoided altogether.
Adopting a plugin to your product, is almost like hiring another developer. Can you trust they did a good job? Did they prepare the plugin for modifications, or did they leave clue-less code?
It’s worth, to play with plugins, try things out. It won’t usually take much time to test things out. And it’s the best way to verify if it’s just a beautiful promo-website.
Simplicity
Example: Native development versus Apache Cordova.
Native development, is when the app is written in native language of the operating system. For Android it’s Java, for iOS it’s Objective C and C. These languages are difficult and most imporantly they are two different ones. That means that if you’re developing an application for iPhones and Androids, you have to develop twice as much code! Not only it’s hard to find someone who can do both, but it will cost you nearly twice as much.
Instead, there’s a solution called Apache Cordova, which allows a web-developer, to wrap a simple website, and export is as both iOS and Android app. Cutting down the development cost by half!
Key takeaway
- avoid hype
- avoid plugins
- follow the popularity & longevity criteria
Do you like this article? Leave me some “claps” or let me know what you think in comments! Thanks!
Read next:
- #1 Idea to Product: Introduction
- #2 Idea to Product: Development : Marketing strategy
- #3 Idea to Product: Resource Management
- #4 Idea to Product: Man for the job
- #5 Idea to Product: Tech Stack
- #6 Idea to Product: Tips and other worth mentioning