Overwhelmingly Geek™

One of the things most tech start ups will face on their forward journey is the decision to select the suite of technologies that will power their product and provide the basic kit of tools that can be used by the development team over time.

For most people this decision would be weighed upon based on the technologies the founders are most familiar with – Visual Studio vs. vim or IIS over Apache; similarly the choice of language seems to be decided by the founders likeness for a particular programming paradigm (OO vs. procedural) and whatever languages they feel most comfortable with (python vs. ruby – which is all the rage right now). I looked around for a sort of guideline as to what a start up should consider before selecting their tools for the trade and came up with a somewhat chaotic list of things to keep in mind:

• Frameworks, frameworks, frameworks (django or, ruby on rails?).
• Programming language (esp. language portability and extensibility).
• Development environment (eclipse, or visual studio?).
• Operating system (GNU/Linux, Windows, FreeBSD?).
• Database (Object oriented or Relational?).

Right now, I’m thinking about Python with Django or Ruby with Rails as language/framework choices, and GNU/Linux (probably standardise on debian) or FreeBSD. I really, really, really like FreeBSD and would love to go down that path, but it seems that a lot of the cloud computing vendors are not providing access to FreeBSD based virtual machines

What do you think, any suggestions?