Comment by dzonga
1 day ago
Users don't care - but users care how reliable your software is, users care about how quickly you can ship the features they request.
Tech stack determines software quality depending on the authors of the software of course.
But certain stacks allow devs to ship faster, fix bugs faster and accommodate user needs.
Look at what 37Signals is able to do with [1] 5 Product Software Engineers. their output is literally 100x of their competitors.
> Look at what 37Signals is able to do with [1] 5 Product Software Engineers. their output is literally 100x of their competitors.
The linked Tweet thread says they have 16 Software Engineers and a separate ops team that he's not counting for some reason.
There are also comments further down that thread about how their "designers" also code, so there is definitely some creative wordplay happening to make the number of programmers sound as small as possible.
Basecamp (37Signals) also made headlines for losing a lot of employees in recent years. They had more engineers in the past when they were building their products.
Basecamp is also over 20 years old and, to be honest, not very feature filled. It's okay-ish if your needs fit within their features, but there's a reason it's not used by a lot of people.
DHH revealed their requests per second rate in a Twitter argument a while ago and it was a surprisingly low number. This was in the context of him claiming that he could host it all on one or two very powerful servers, if I recall correctly.
When discussing all things Basecamp (37Signals) it's really important to remember that their loud internet presence makes them seem like they have a lot more users than they really do. They've also been refining basically the same product for two decades and had larger teams working in the past.