How I Chose My Side-Hustle Tech Stack
Choosing a tech stack for my side-hustle ended up being a surprisingly difficult decision.
The battle was between heart and mind.
What my heart wanted: React (to learn something new), .NET Core and MongoDB.
What my brain was telling me: Angular, .NET Core and Azure SQL.
Why was my brain telling me this?
It was the path of least resistance. The quickest way to get my side-hustle up and running. I use these technologies in my day job to develop and maintain mission critical, enterprise applications. Real-world production issues such performance, security and infrastructure are all fresh in my mind and need little research.
Add to this that I’ve got a full-time job and a family, so time to work on a side-hustle is limited. As a result, it made more sense to pick the same tech stack I was using day-in and day-out at work.
What if I made the wrong decision?
This was a constant doubt I had in the beginning. Not so much with the technology choices, but how I architected the software. I was constantly flip-flopping between under and over-engineering (I finally opted for under-engineering).
The technologies themselves are popular and battle tested, so the likelihood I’ll come across a catastrophic issue is minute. Couple this with my experience that every system gets rewritten at some point, it really doesn’t matter too much right now. If my side-hustle becomes my main-hustle and there was something seriously wrong with my choices, I’d just get my team to rewrite it — this would happen at some point in the future anyway.
So how has it turned out so far?
Well, I actually have two side-hustles: mathsapp.com and findmyeventplanner.com. Both live right now. Both incomplete right now.
Choosing Angular for findmyeventplanner.com was the wrong decision, as React would’ve been for the same reason: SEO. SEO is critical for a directory. Google can handle Angular applications, but many other Search Engines can’t. But even with Google I’m having issues with a lot of pages getting excluded from the crawl. Add to this oidc-client-js, which is used by Angular (and React) for Authentication with IdentityServer, doesn’t work with Server Side Rendering without custom modifications.
I put off the decision to rewrite the Angular client in ASP.NET (again a decision that was based on what will take the least amount of time) until very recently, as that side-hustle has started to bring in a little bit of money, so it’s worth the time commitment to me now.
For mathsapp.com it’d be very difficult to implement an application like that without using a JavaScript framework. So unfortunately SEO is a price I’ll have to pay right now.
If you’re thinking about starting your own-side hustle I hope this helps.
If you’ve got any questions to help you get started, please comment below 👇🏼.