WEBVTT NOTE This file was generated by Descript 00:00:06.036 --> 00:00:08.946 Thronmax MDrill One Pro & USB Video: Hey folks, and welcome to the small 00:00:08.946 --> 00:00:11.736 tech podcast from Ephemere Creative. 00:00:11.926 --> 00:00:16.406 Today we're going to be talking about choosing a tech stack. 00:00:16.406 --> 00:00:20.696 If you enjoy the work that we do, we'd really appreciate it if you hit that like, 00:00:20.696 --> 00:00:26.546 and subscribe button on YouTube, or if you subscribe in your podcast app of choice. 00:00:26.796 --> 00:00:30.006 We're a tiny team and every little bit helps. 00:00:30.306 --> 00:00:32.496 First let's ask the question. 00:00:32.556 --> 00:00:34.116 What is a tech stack? 00:00:34.386 --> 00:00:38.636 A lot of you might already know but for people who haven't been involved 00:00:38.636 --> 00:00:42.566 in this kind of stuff before, it's normal to not know what that means. 00:00:43.066 --> 00:00:47.266 Essentially, almost every technical system has multiple 00:00:47.266 --> 00:00:49.876 layers built on top of each other. 00:00:50.376 --> 00:00:53.766 And you put those things together to create like a functioning stack. 00:00:53.796 --> 00:00:59.406 That is how all of your systems, how your application, how your business 00:00:59.406 --> 00:01:02.286 processes and other stuff work. 00:01:02.786 --> 00:01:07.076 So a lot of the time, we'll talk about a tech stack in the context of 00:01:07.076 --> 00:01:08.996 what I'll call an application stack. 00:01:08.996 --> 00:01:14.696 So specifically what you need to have a functioning mobile app or a web app 00:01:14.696 --> 00:01:16.436 or website or something like that. 00:01:16.936 --> 00:01:20.386 But you'll also hear the term used with reference to a marketing 00:01:20.386 --> 00:01:23.026 stack or an operational stack. 00:01:23.526 --> 00:01:28.776 And that's because even outside of the strict bounds of building software, you're 00:01:28.776 --> 00:01:33.186 still layering technologies on top of each other to get your marketing work 00:01:33.186 --> 00:01:36.376 done and to structure your operations. 00:01:36.876 --> 00:01:39.696 But in the context of a small tech business. 00:01:40.176 --> 00:01:42.156 Those things, all meshed together. 00:01:42.186 --> 00:01:45.636 You're going to build your application in a way that it integrates with 00:01:45.636 --> 00:01:49.656 your marketing tools and you want your operations to be tied 00:01:49.656 --> 00:01:52.266 into your application as well. 00:01:52.766 --> 00:01:57.296 But today for simplicity sake, we're going to focus on the application side. 00:01:57.796 --> 00:02:02.536 So are we talking about choosing a tech stack or building a tech stack? 00:02:02.736 --> 00:02:06.816 There are some tech stacks that are off the shelf. 00:02:07.236 --> 00:02:08.016 Kind of... 00:02:08.256 --> 00:02:11.436 you might've heard of things like the LAMP stack or you 00:02:11.436 --> 00:02:13.596 might've heard of MERN and MEAN. 00:02:13.796 --> 00:02:19.076 But by and large one way or another, even if you use a commonly referred 00:02:19.076 --> 00:02:23.066 to stack like MERN, MEAN or LAMP, you're going to be setting up each of 00:02:23.066 --> 00:02:27.986 the components independently and you will need to make other choices about 00:02:27.986 --> 00:02:32.216 what goes into your stack and how you get it up and running in production. 00:02:32.716 --> 00:02:36.946 So you might ask yourself at this point, does this question really makes sense? 00:02:36.976 --> 00:02:39.286 Are we choosing a tech stack? 00:02:39.346 --> 00:02:42.136 Well, just sort of our you're choosing the components. 00:02:42.136 --> 00:02:46.756 You are building it, but I think the questions that you have to ask yourself 00:02:46.756 --> 00:02:51.649 when you choose each of the components, could be asked about the stack itself. 00:02:51.799 --> 00:02:55.099 You don't want to just choose your components in isolation. 00:02:55.129 --> 00:02:57.559 You are choosing these as part of a whole. 00:02:58.059 --> 00:03:00.969 So with that in mind, I want to go over some of the questions 00:03:00.969 --> 00:03:04.959 that we ask ourselves when we're choosing components in a stack. 00:03:05.459 --> 00:03:05.759 Okay. 00:03:05.759 --> 00:03:10.829 So my top priority personally is who is going to work on this, 00:03:10.829 --> 00:03:12.419 who is going to work with it. 00:03:12.919 --> 00:03:16.009 And what are their needs and their preferences. 00:03:16.509 --> 00:03:20.169 I'm talking primarily from an engineering perspective here, but you'll also want 00:03:20.169 --> 00:03:23.799 to think about other people who interact with the stack in different ways, not 00:03:23.799 --> 00:03:25.899 just the people who are coding against it. 00:03:26.399 --> 00:03:30.419 So you might want to choose a component because it's easy for someone who's 00:03:30.419 --> 00:03:35.709 non-technical to log in and interact with it, maybe to download backups and 00:03:35.709 --> 00:03:38.169 get some data off of it for example. 00:03:38.669 --> 00:03:42.029 You also need to think about what is your infrastructure budget? 00:03:42.329 --> 00:03:45.239 There are certain things that cost more than others to run 00:03:45.659 --> 00:03:47.129 for a variety of reasons. 00:03:47.159 --> 00:03:50.849 And you need to take that into account when you're making that choice. 00:03:51.349 --> 00:03:54.079 You also need to think about what your maintenance budget is. 00:03:54.379 --> 00:04:00.409 There are things that could be components of your tech stack that require updates. 00:04:00.439 --> 00:04:04.159 And with each update, you'll need to make changes. 00:04:04.159 --> 00:04:07.879 You'll need to make sure that everything is working properly together. 00:04:08.079 --> 00:04:11.649 Some things are more complex to manage than others. 00:04:11.649 --> 00:04:14.979 So you need to be aware of those types of things, and you need to 00:04:14.979 --> 00:04:19.319 be aware of the resources that are available for maintenance 00:04:19.319 --> 00:04:21.179 when you make that type of choice. 00:04:21.679 --> 00:04:25.969 You also need to think about legal requirements in some cases that might be 00:04:25.969 --> 00:04:30.739 around licensing, but in other cases it might be about things like data residency. 00:04:30.769 --> 00:04:35.925 Are you able to deploy your stack to an infrastructure provider that runs in the 00:04:35.925 --> 00:04:38.355 country where your data needs to live. 00:04:38.835 --> 00:04:40.785 If not, you can't use it. 00:04:41.285 --> 00:04:46.895 A specific example of that, that I can think of is a project where we were 00:04:46.895 --> 00:04:50.685 considering using Firebase because it would have been very easy for us 00:04:50.685 --> 00:04:55.995 to get off the ground, but the data had to stay in Canada and Firebase 00:04:55.995 --> 00:04:59.985 doesn't run Canadian data centers so we had to choose an alternative. 00:05:00.045 --> 00:05:01.795 We ended up going with Supabase. 00:05:01.995 --> 00:05:05.415 You should also think about performance requirements. 00:05:05.445 --> 00:05:10.755 There are certain types of things that you're going to build that require 00:05:10.815 --> 00:05:13.555 really fast, high-performing tools. 00:05:13.755 --> 00:05:19.115 But often things that are, high-performing also require more 00:05:19.115 --> 00:05:21.245 time and expertise to work with. 00:05:21.745 --> 00:05:24.745 So you might need to hire a much more expensive developer 00:05:24.775 --> 00:05:29.945 to work on for example, a tool that processes video on the fly. 00:05:30.445 --> 00:05:34.825 I also find it really important to consider your growth projections. 00:05:35.215 --> 00:05:39.505 You don't want to, over-engineer a system and choose tools that are 00:05:39.505 --> 00:05:45.055 really complicated to mesh together if you're probably only going to have 00:05:45.085 --> 00:05:49.915 a hundred users on an app that won't really need more than one server. 00:05:50.115 --> 00:05:54.325 Conversely though, you also don't want to find yourself in a situation where 00:05:54.325 --> 00:05:57.295 you've used tools that limit your growth. 00:05:57.535 --> 00:06:02.235 You want to understand that trajectory and choose the tools that are going 00:06:02.235 --> 00:06:04.545 to serve that trajectory best. 00:06:04.745 --> 00:06:08.855 Ideally, of course you use tools that can do both well. 00:06:09.035 --> 00:06:14.225 That don't cost a lot to run at the beginning and can serve your hundred 00:06:14.225 --> 00:06:20.135 users on a single machine well, but also can scale to hundreds of thousands. 00:06:20.385 --> 00:06:25.335 Of course scaling is going to require engineering one way or another. 00:06:25.535 --> 00:06:28.835 But you can choose tools that allow you to take on that 00:06:28.835 --> 00:06:31.265 process more easily than others. 00:06:31.765 --> 00:06:32.065 Okay. 00:06:32.065 --> 00:06:35.095 So we've talked about the different questions that we like to ask when we 00:06:35.095 --> 00:06:40.155 think about building a tech stack, and I'm going to give you a practical example of 00:06:40.155 --> 00:06:42.675 how we've done this in the past, sort of. 00:06:42.875 --> 00:06:46.445 By plugging our very own project, the Chewy Stack. 00:06:46.945 --> 00:06:52.577 So we've been developing the Chewy Stack over many years essentially by taking 00:06:52.577 --> 00:06:56.807 our learnings from different projects and finding commonalities and piecing 00:06:56.807 --> 00:07:01.337 together a stack that made sense for us to do our work and to work with 00:07:01.367 --> 00:07:04.157 the types of clients that we take on. 00:07:04.657 --> 00:07:09.607 We wanted to unify all these different tools and processes into a single coherent 00:07:09.607 --> 00:07:12.457 stack that we could reuse and optimize. 00:07:12.957 --> 00:07:16.167 So I'll go over the different questions and give you a quick breakdown of our 00:07:16.167 --> 00:07:18.717 answers in the context of the Chewy Stack. 00:07:19.217 --> 00:07:20.837 So who needs to work with it? 00:07:21.137 --> 00:07:25.847 By and large, the focus was making sure that developers who knew JavaScript 00:07:25.877 --> 00:07:31.177 and node JS could hop into it pretty easily, while giving them guardrails 00:07:31.177 --> 00:07:33.187 to help them write good code. 00:07:33.687 --> 00:07:37.557 The infrastructure budget for our clients varies quite a bit. 00:07:37.757 --> 00:07:43.517 But we wanted to use a baseline of around $20 a month for the smallest projects. 00:07:43.717 --> 00:07:46.597 Considering the maintenance budget is also important. 00:07:46.747 --> 00:07:51.607 We have some clients who have a longterm maintenance budget, but others don't. 00:07:52.107 --> 00:07:55.047 So they need to be able to run the app until we work with them 00:07:55.047 --> 00:08:00.042 next without having to make any changes or run into any problems? 00:08:00.542 --> 00:08:05.372 Like I mentioned before data, residency is a thing we've worked with multiple clients 00:08:05.372 --> 00:08:07.982 who need to keep their data in Canada. 00:08:08.042 --> 00:08:10.892 And we know that this exists all over the world. 00:08:10.982 --> 00:08:14.912 There are plenty of reasons that your data might need to stay in the 00:08:14.912 --> 00:08:16.682 country that you're operating in. 00:08:17.182 --> 00:08:20.632 So for us, it was important that the Chewy Stack be able to do that. 00:08:20.962 --> 00:08:25.432 You should be able to run it on infrastructure that runs in your country. 00:08:25.932 --> 00:08:29.682 Most of our clients don't actually have any strict performance requirements. 00:08:29.712 --> 00:08:33.522 Of course, there's a user experience requirement. 00:08:33.552 --> 00:08:39.282 Things need to be snappy on the user end, but we generally don't have 00:08:39.282 --> 00:08:44.202 any projects that require heavy data processing or anything along those lines. 00:08:44.702 --> 00:08:50.342 We did build things so that you can take care of that sort of task asynchronously. 00:08:50.842 --> 00:08:54.892 And so that you could integrate with other tooling if you wanted to, but 00:08:54.922 --> 00:08:58.912 out of the box, it's not really a concern that we've run into very often. 00:08:59.412 --> 00:09:01.272 So what about growth projections? 00:09:01.602 --> 00:09:07.382 I think everyone has a dream of growing their app to serve hundreds 00:09:07.382 --> 00:09:09.602 of thousands or millions of people. 00:09:09.802 --> 00:09:11.752 But generally the clients that we've worked with, the 00:09:11.752 --> 00:09:13.192 projects that we've worked on. 00:09:13.222 --> 00:09:17.302 I have a good understanding of their initial scale and 00:09:17.302 --> 00:09:18.922 how it'll move from there. 00:09:19.282 --> 00:09:23.212 And while we've built things so that it can grow significantly. 00:09:23.542 --> 00:09:29.572 It also is easy to work with at a small scale and deploy in that context. 00:09:30.072 --> 00:09:32.352 So those are some of the things you might want to think about. 00:09:32.382 --> 00:09:36.492 You might choose a particular database like my SQL or PostgreSQL. 00:09:36.792 --> 00:09:40.512 Uh, because you have relational data that makes a lot of sense 00:09:40.512 --> 00:09:42.132 to put in a database like that. 00:09:42.552 --> 00:09:48.542 Or you might use a no SQL database like Mongo, because you need to scale to 00:09:48.562 --> 00:09:53.222 huge numbers very quickly and Mongo might make it easier to do that. 00:09:53.522 --> 00:09:58.712 Or maybe you need to be able to handle lots of things happening at the same time 00:09:58.712 --> 00:10:03.782 and Go, or Erlang might make it a lot easier to handle those types of processes. 00:10:04.282 --> 00:10:06.992 Anyway, those are some thoughts, I hope it helped. 00:10:07.192 --> 00:10:10.690 If you enjoy this stuff, please like, and subscribe on YouTube. 00:10:10.940 --> 00:10:14.359 Subscribe to the podcast in your app of choice. 00:10:14.359 --> 00:10:16.459 And please leave us a review. 00:10:16.459 --> 00:10:17.839 We'd love to hear what you think. 00:10:17.839 --> 00:10:20.149 And also we'd love to have you on the podcast. 00:10:20.179 --> 00:10:23.119 If you're building a small tech product, come chat with me. 00:10:23.119 --> 00:10:26.248 Let's talk about your tech stack, or maybe let's talk about how 00:10:26.248 --> 00:10:29.548 you've approached different hurdles as you build your company. 00:10:30.048 --> 00:10:32.148 Also sign up for our newsletter. 00:10:32.148 --> 00:10:36.484 We'll be sending out tons of great stuff about how to build small tech products. 00:10:36.484 --> 00:10:40.804 Everything from videos, blog posts, podcast, episodes that you may have 00:10:40.804 --> 00:10:43.105 missed and plenty of other stuff. 00:10:43.105 --> 00:10:48.535 Go to smalltechpodcast.com and click the newsletter button in the nav bar. 00:10:48.835 --> 00:10:50.965 And that will take you to the right spot. 00:10:51.465 --> 00:10:54.705 So that's it for this week's episode, we all want to do 00:10:54.705 --> 00:10:55.845 something good in the world. 00:10:55.875 --> 00:10:58.845 So go out there and build something good folks. 00:10:59.025 --> 00:10:59.595 See ya.