Come for the Ride…

Changing languages in mid project is one of those things that’s uncomfortable to do and very uncomfortable to talk about; especially for startups. When things like this change in big organizations, something must have failed or someone must’ve gotten fired. However, neither of that has happened here.

Although ultimately it doesn’t matter what a site is coded in (unless it’s Cold Fusion), I felt our team’s grasp of the Django/Python platform wasn’t up to par with what it should be for the team to crank out the code in a reasonable speedy time. From a business perspective, our goal is to build this site using a familiar platform and to build it in the cheapest, fastest and easiest way possible. What we don’t have… is the luxury to learn as we go.

I can say from experience that intimately understanding your technical platform is key in being agile. In my last startup, we used a language I had no idea how to edit and that ultimately killed it. It wasn’t necessarily bad programming or a bad language, but the lack of personal knowledge kept the business website stale and eventually out-of-date. (Of course, everything can be fixed with more resources, but that wasn’t available.) On the flip side, this is why so many CMS systems exist today to help larger organizations manage their content; even if their team aren’t all techies.

After evaluating our team’s strengths and technical prowess, I think for us, php is a better bet. With more overall support on the php side, I feel safer knowing that help can be more easily found if needed. Also when we are ready to pull off more complicated targeting abilities, php will be the easiest to manipulate and update.

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