I have a good number of people ask me what software stack they should use. I always have a two-part answer:
- Use what you're familiar with. If there's something that you've spent a good amount of time using, stick with that one.
- Rails. People are usually surprised when I say this because I don't use Rails, and while I spent some time writing Ruby when I was at Stripe, I would not consider myself an aficionado by any means.
My answer is motivated by a melange of various inputs. When choosing a software stack, you want something that:
- is commonly used, so you can easily hire and onboard folks and find resources without having to pull teeth.
- is battle-tested and has been around for a while, ensuring there's a lot of prior art, and you don’t have to worry about living at the bleeding edge.
- has a robust and productive third-party ecosystem with packages dedicated to solving the problems you're going to run into as you get a SaaS off the ground.
- is dynamic and portable in terms of hosting, so you're not tied to one or two specific infrastructure providers.
- is productive, which of course is a squishy term that's impossible to quantify but I don't think anyone's going to really say Ruby or Rails is a hard language/framework with which to make forward progress.
Rails tackles all of these things and, in my opinion, is marginally better than everything else. I say marginally because I don't think Rails has so much more productivity inside of it that you should discard 5 years of experience with PHP, Python, or some other language that you're more comfortable with to pursue it.
But, if you are coming at the SaaS world from a complete state of "tabula rasa", Rails and the Ruby ecosystem seems like the way to go.
(Really, though, it doesn't matter. Your software stack is almost certainly not going to decide the life or death of your business.)
