Thursday, June 11, 2020

Tech stacks are basically a group of technologies that a company uses to build an application for the web or mobile devices. It is usually comprised of various tools, programming languages and libraries, servers, software frameworks used by its developers to achieve such a solution.

Sometimes you have a few reasons to find out what technology another website or business is using.

First perhaps you’re curious and just want to learn more. Many of us grew up inspired and fascinated with technology as well as having a healthy admiration and respect for these tech startups. Perhaps we want to emulate their success or are awed at how they became the company they are today. We become so enamored with a company perhaps we want to reverse engineer their success.

Also, perhaps you want to go into business and want to outdo your competitor. In order to have a tech advantage you want to know what your competitors are doing and may be doing a form of market research and also detective work to track down how they do things.

In order to help you do this you will need a few things. Mainly, the Internet is the first thing as with a bit of online research you can find your answers after checking around in a search engine. Or you can as some tech and programming forums.

There are also sites devoted solely to this research information and that is, “what technology stacks” (tech stacks) are these companies using.

We know we can first off use a lot of great tools that are available online to check out another site for instance. Let’s say we want to see if another site is using a particular sitebuilder or theme or some other technologies. You can use an online “theme detector” tool. Or let’s say you are looking at a site which has videos media files which can be downloaded. You may be able to use those to help you handle certain formats for processing.

In our particular instance we want to do analysis of a website but perhaps there are already sites that have compiled or aggregated this information for you.

Here are some examples:

One particular tool is Stackshare.io. You can use their site to find out about certain tools used in the industry you are searching for, find out what is trending, and even discover what a particular big name company may be using for their main platform. This particular one lays out a few icons and has a small list over various top companies and what they might use.
For example, you can find some information about whether a company uses Node.js or Apache web server type technologies or even Linux tools.

Another site I found for example was that sometimes short articles are written that describe what tech works for a company. According to Makeuseof.com, there was an article about the FB company. It mentioned that they use a LAMP structure.

You can also try Netcraft. This shows the infrastructure of a website and technologies that a site uses through Netcraft’s data mining capabilities according to their site. You can find who hosts the site, what programs are running it, network identification and security information.

“Built With” is also a good site that tells what makes up a site.

Then there are browser extensions that work as add-ons that you can install into Firefox or Chrome that can be used also to analyze a site. Examples are Wappalyzer and W3 Techs.

And lastly there is Rescan.io and SimilarTech that can be used to find more information about technologies for market research.

If you’re a business owner or a entrepreneur you really can’t afford to be behind the curve. A good business does as much research from customers and customer surveys as well as “reading the room” on other businessed. So you can use these and other tools to find their secret sauce.
Plus you can fulfill your curiosity about what the “big boys” use. Ooh, NASA uses Thinkpads and SuSE? Oh, does Twitter use CentOS or something else? Ford using any RedHat software? Who’s running what?

It’s helpful to know.