Show HN: StackShare – discover and discuss software stacks

by yonasb • 12 years ago

218 75 12 years ago

khaledh• 12 years ago

To avoid some confusion, this was actually called leanstack.io, and it was launched back in 2013.

yonasb9• 12 years ago

We wrote a blog post about the relaunch: http://stackshare.io/posts/leanstack-io-is-now-stackshare. We should probably link to the post on the homepage though.

cfitz• 12 years ago

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)?

andrewjkerr• 12 years ago

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.

josegonzalez• 12 years ago

Seems like the scanning may be broken. I just tried it with https://seatgeek.com and it says the site isn't public.

yonasb9• 12 years ago

Eh, sorry. Should be fixed now. Try pasting in the URL

waitingkuo• 12 years ago

Nice site. I've been the user since it called leanstack.io . It's pretty useful!

sehr• 12 years ago

I'm honestly surprised this hasn't been created before, really cool idea!

gk1• 12 years ago

http://leanstack.io is very similar.

EDIT: Oh, leanstack.io now redirects to stackshare.io... So I guess this is a rebranding.

kruk• 12 years ago

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.

Added to favourites!

yonasb9• 12 years ago

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.

rip747• 12 years ago

hmmm... doesn't seem to detect cfml as being used. other than that, very nice!!!

I scanned the cfwheels repo: https://github.com/cfwheels/cfwheels

picked up almost everything that we're using

hackertoolbox• 12 years ago

Great job! I wouldn't have created http://hackertoolbox.com if I knew this. Time to kill myself!

BinaryIdiot2• 12 years ago

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?

yonasb9• 12 years ago

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.

BinaryIdiot2• 12 years ago

Ah I didn't notice that. Nice!

BenderV• 12 years ago

First of all, thank you. It's great!

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 ?

_xnmw• 12 years ago

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.

mateuszf2• 12 years ago

"Browsing" button on the main page doesn't work for. Firefox on OSX.

Bognar• 12 years ago

Doesn't work in Nightly on Windows 8 either.

disposition2• 12 years ago

Didn't work for me in Chrome until I disabled (paused) Ghostery.

yonasb9• 12 years ago

Sorry! Do you have javascript disabled? If so, you'll have a very hard time using the site because of how we're tracking events.

mateuszf2• 12 years ago

I never disable javascript. Also no Ghostery.

porker• 12 years ago

Doesn't work with HTTP Switchboard enabled on Chrome either. None of the links on the site do, which makes it a one-page site... ;)

patja• 12 years ago

Where are the Windows stack components? For example, I don't believe Stack Overflow runs solely on Redis for their data storage.

cpcarey• 12 years ago

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?

joeclark77• 12 years ago

This is great. I'll definitely show it to my students (undergrad Information Systems majors) who are trying to figure out what tools to learn.

rubiquity• 12 years ago

When did IaaS/PaaS/SaaS products become part of the "stack?"

glenngillen3• 12 years ago

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.

sarciszewski• 12 years ago

Oh, neat. This will save me ~5 minutes of recon time if I ever need to do a pen-test for any of the companies that are submitted here. ;)

glenngillen3• 12 years ago

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.

dexterbt1• 12 years ago

This and the then leanstack.io is actually close / already fulfills #54 idea in https://github.com/samsquire/ideas, great and very interesting stuff.

Jhsto• 12 years ago

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?

yonasb9• 12 years ago

Sorry about that. We gather metrics on site usage so we can monitor how people are using the site. We're looking into a fix.

PRIVACYINVASION• 12 years ago

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.

coderjames• 12 years ago

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.

ecesena2• 12 years ago

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).

yonasb9• 12 years ago

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 :)

ecesena2• 12 years ago

Awesome, thank you for the details!

nichochar• 12 years ago

This is basically leanstack right? Whats the catch, rebranding?

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

We explain the relaunch and new features here: http://stackshare.io/posts/leanstack-io-is-now-stackshare

rmsaksida• 12 years ago

The front page's "Sign in with Github" doesn't work for me on Chrome/Linux (Chromium 37 on Ubuntu 14.04).

jimmcslim• 12 years ago

Awesome idea. Top Trumps for Software Stacks!

volker2• 12 years ago

No RSS feed... really?

Tehnix2• 12 years ago

I didn't know people still used that. What would you want out of the RSS feed from this site? (Actually curious :3..)

Edit: Ah, didn't see the trending updates before now. Altering my question a bit: is there a lot of ppl on HN using RSS?

bvirkler• 12 years ago

I do, using http://newsblur.com.

volker2• 12 years ago

Oh... look how many people switched just to feedly after google shut their service down.

What I want to have out of a feed? Getting the updates/new stacks without daily checking the page.

twelvedigits3• 12 years ago

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.

It's really dry territory. You can do well here.

Tehnix2• 12 years ago

I'd especially love that for eCommerce systems as well. They require a bit more of a commitment than a CMS (at least that is the usual case).

Right now, the only mature ones I know of are all PHP based :/.. I hope that's just me missing something though.

twelvedigits3• 12 years ago

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?

coml0nq• 12 years ago

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).

This is actually a candidate for shit hn says.

feider• 12 years ago

For other than startups, this provides nice gallery of idiocy:

"Look, this is how many external Saas-dependencies we have and we have no control over our service."

Just saying, because it is one thing to use open source and totally different thing to rely on 3rd party services.

avighnay2• 12 years ago

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...

glenngillen3• 12 years ago

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.

niutech• 12 years ago

Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year.

For APIs, there is a great resource: http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

For CMSes, there is a dedicated website: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Alternatively, you can search GitHub for CMSes from this year: https://github.com/search?q=CMS+created%3A>2013-11-07

jimmyislive• 12 years ago

Nice work yonas... here's my side project as well, doing something similar :)

https://packageindex.com/#!/

All the best Yonas...

prydonius• 12 years ago

This is really cool, I've wanted to create something like this myself for some time. How did you go about initially curating enough data?

On another note, it would be great to see a brief description about why the company uses a particular technology.

yonasb9• 12 years ago

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 :)

aliakhtar• 12 years ago

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?

Nowaker3• 12 years ago

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.

yonasb9• 12 years ago

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

Nowaker3• 12 years ago

That's indeed extremely funny. I spotted it some time after I wrote the original post, then started writing my auto-trolling reply to self. ;)

Nowaker3• 12 years ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts• 12 years ago

Doesn't let you submit a new site on mobile :(. Nexus 5 with latest stable Chrome.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

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?"

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

Had a similar idea and an awesome name "What the Stack?"

Wish I would have went with it seeing how awesome this is.

hliyan• 12 years ago

Is there a way to embed this inside a company website?

techaddict009• 12 years ago

One feature I would request is search. Say I want to see all stack which have Ec2 or digital ocean in it.

Rest this will seriously be helpful to us.

Edit: Its already there but not directly.

swah• 12 years ago

Joshu had the very interesting http://www.stackparts.com

Show HN: StackShare – discover and discuss software stacks

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