Are there any other popular (>10k DAUs) sites that still use an esoteric, homegrown tech stack? If you have worked on them, what do you think, is it a legacy mess nobody wants to touch, or a pleasure to work with?
PG made an assertion once that websites (in contrast to desktop software) are free to use any stack of their choosing, as long as it can take in HTTP requests and output JSON or HTML. This intuitively seems to be true, especially so with how powerful modern machines can get, but it seems like it hasn't increased stack diversity much.
The advantages of boring technology and "resume-driven development" seem to outweigh whatever gains you may get from using something custom.
Are there any other popular (>10k DAUs) sites that still use an esoteric, homegrown tech stack? If you have worked on them, what do you think, is it a legacy mess nobody wants to touch, or a pleasure to work with?
I do. It's absolutely lovely.
We can make decisions based on what's best for the user, and not based on what the latest fad is.
In the time I've been in charge of this company's web sites, we've reduced cost drastically, improved reliability, and cut time to production in half.
Hiring can be problematic, because there's a lot of people out there who can't think through problems; or only know how to do x in one tool, and are unwilling/unable to learn something else.
The big keys are: We're not a tech company, so management doesn't care what we do, as long as it gets done. We build a lot of our own tools, so they fit perfectly into our workflow, which makes them and us more efficient. And we don't have to have 99.999999% uptime for no reason. Management is OK if the web sites are slow or unavailable for a few minutes each week, as long as they're back to normal in less time than it takes for someone to call and complain. And our clients love to call and complain.