This is a continuation of the series where I try to measure dynamic of the Hacker News Who is Hiring thread. The first part of the description of the thread itself and popular languages could be found here. The second one about remote work and popular hiring locations here

This time, I will try to focus on supporting technologies: libraries, frameworks, storage engines, hosting platform, and docker. Mastery of any of these is either a hard requirement or a nice to have skill in any startup.

Disclaimer: You are looking at only one source - The "Who is Hiring" thread from Hacker News. While the thread itself is a pretty good source of information, it tends to focus mostly on startup part of the entire IT industry. Any attempts to extrapolate trends presented here to the industry as a whole can be slightly misleading.

Let's start from the top.

Frontend frameworks

Cleary React is the winner here, Facebook did enormous job delivering a good technology and even better job convincing the JS crowd how good it is. Looking at the chart we can find that Angular had its moment as well although something happened in September 2014, interestingly enough on the 22-23 September 2014 the Angular 2.0 was announced with no backward compatibility. I guess Google people didn't consider Python 3 as a good case study. Anyways, it looks like the battle is lost, but Angular still gets a decent amount of attention. jQuery is there as well, but If you wrote a line or two in either React or Angular you might be aware that those programming models don't really require jQuery to be present, also querySelector method is supported by all major browsers.

Two years ago I would call them just Javascript frameworks, but it looks like this isn't the case anymore. Right now with transpilers (source to source compilers) you can use what works best for you.

Backend frameworks

Ruby on Rails and Django both look as a solid choice for the next startup's stack. On average both lost some audience, but the gap between them and the next thing is really big.

Storage

The most popular choice among the storage engines is Postgres, no surprise here.

Postgres is doing really well in the relational realm but also gradually implementing a subset of non-relational features, therefore stealing the pie from MongoDB and Redis. MySQL under the Oracle umbrella is not doing so well. Announced as a MySQL replacement, MariaDB didn't convince too large of an audience either.

Among the NoSQL solutions Redis and MongoDB are popular choices, but as mentioned before, both are on descending side of the trend.

Version control

Hosting solutions

We are looking only at cloud solutions. My feeling was that comparing dedicated server providers wouldn't be too fair. While AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are globally available solutions, most of the dedicated server providers are local.

AWS is an unquestionable leader here, as for today 16% job posts on Hacker News mention Amazon's solution.

Docker

I couldn't find anything comparable to Docker. It looks like some alternate solutions slowly are emerging. For now, Docker seems to be an unquestionable leader on the market, which it seems it also created.

Today, Docker appears in 10% of all job posts on Hacker News. Despite the mixed emotions that rise in Hacker News comments, it looks like it will find its place in the startup stack panorama.

The end

This entry closes the series about the Hacker News' "Who is Hiring" thread. Although we are not abandoning the idea of measuring and counting things, they will appear in different shapes and forms. Please sing-up to our newsletter and stay tuned.

Special thanks for @aniabywanis, @fijall, @jqbj, @rmldsky,
@harisibrahimkv for comments and edits.