Stack Exchange Engineering: How We Built Our Blog
In this technical retrospective (2015), @jonhmchan shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 81 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 59 comments
That’s exactly what I just did for my daily video / podcasting site Rate My App.com.
- Everything in markdown
- Generate the podcasts as an RSS feed
- Generate the list of videos as JSON, filtered inside the AngularJS app
Such an approach is not great for SEO in the short-term, so I won't be surprised if they lose ranking because their posts and comments are missing from the the html until their jQuery code fetches and renders them.
For me, I don't have 700 posts so that's easy to address later once I have content worth indexing, keeping the urls the same of course. :)
They lost a simple interface designed to edit blog posts and now their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown.
They lost the comment system and had to move the data to an external provider, which instantly bit them.
They had to write Python scripts to munge the data.
But now they have the performance of static html. I guess just changing two lines in the nginx configuration did not came to mind.
I think this was a very poor investment and will never pay off.
Spoiler alert: it takes awhile to get there, but the answer is: Jekyll. Which is neat...even as active as their blogging efforts are, as I was reading the intro grafs, I kept thinking, "Yeah, could be done just fine as Jekyll"...I was mostly expecting them to announce new in-house built blogging software, but was thrilled to see that the rest of the post is about how to migrate from WordPress to Jekyll.
I'm all for spending engineering time on non-project related tasks occasionally, but this seems like an excessive use of valuable time to reinvent the wheel. I'm sure they could have found a blogging platform that didn't require custom markdown interfaces, Python scripting, and re-writing everything from scratch. It's just a blog.
Static blogs are doing pretty well, but setting up a sepparate interface or flow for writers - not admins and developers - is still a big of a chore, unless you don’t mind giving people full access to the site repo.
I’m thinking about setting up a separate draft and post repo and importing them into the root with git subtree.