Ask HN: What's your absolute favorite tech stack, after having tried others? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your absolute favorite tech stack, after having tried others?

52 pointsuser0x1d52 comments

I've tried quite a few programming languages/frameworks for both backend and frontend, and I found that I absolutely love working with React on the frontend and I'm on the fence between two options for the backend: Django (because it's so easy to come up with something) and Golang + GraphQL, due to the typed nature of Go and how you combine them with TypeScript on the frontend.

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Over the years, here is the tools that answered all of my needs.

Backend:

  - Apollo Server (GraphQL, Javascript/Typescript)
  - Hasura (GraphQL frontend to PostgreSQL, translating GraphQL queries directly to SQL)
  - Erlang/Elixir for distributed applications

Frontend:

  - VueJS + VueX + ApolloClient
  - Bulma (CSS framework, https://bulma.io )

Dev environment:

  - Docker + docker-compose (a single command to spin up the full stack)
  - Makefile (so easy to write, automate any "long" commands)
  - KinD (Kubernetes in Docker, https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/ )
  - Lens (a Kubernetes IDE, https://k8slens.dev/ )

(Pre)Production environment:

  - Managed Kubernetes or k0s ( https://k0sproject.io )

Deployment:

  - Github + PR based workflow
  - CI pipeline as a multi-stage Dockerfile + Github Actions
  - CD with ansible + helm + Github Actions

What do you use `kind` for?

Whenever I'm working on a Kubernetes Operator (like Kubevisor[1]), it's useful for testing.

Also, in a Github Actions workflow, to run full E2E tests.

  [1] - https://kubevisor.io

> - Apollo Server (GraphQL, Javascript/Typescript) > - Hasura (GraphQL frontend to PostgreSQL, translating GraphQL queries directly to SQL)

I'm just getting started with GraphQL. Tried Graphile first (also on top of PostgreSQL), from various other comments I've read. I have a harder time with having the current auth logic (in nodejs) work, since most Graphile tutorials are with row level security. Not sure if I should move to RLS too.

What do you think about Graphile vs Apollo Server+Hasura?

Hasura handles auth quite well (row level AND column level). See this doc[1].

But in general, I either let the reverse proxy handles auth so my backend doesn't have to do anything, or I use the ORY stack[2].

  [1] - https://hasura.io/docs/latest/graphql/core/auth/index.html
  [2] - https://github.com/ory

Rails + graphql-ruby + ActiveAdmin + Devise + SideKiq/Faktory + Postgres remains a ridiculously productive combination for me.

I'm leaning more towards Faktory these days because it makes it possible to move individual jobs from Ruby to Go if/when performance becomes an issue and the much simpler client-side logic makes making performance-related adjustments much simpler and less risky.

For the front-end, I've been dabbling with Next.js, and using Tailwind heavily. Deployed to S3/CloudFront. I'm not completely sold on Next.js yet, but I've liked it better than the other options I've tried so far.

For deployment of the backend / admin tooling, Docker + ECR + EC2 + CoreOS, although I'm looking at changing out CoreOS for Debian now that it's effectively DOA. CI does a Docker image build and pushes to ECR, tagging with the git hash. Deployment consists of changing an environment-specific tag to the desired image, and replacing servers. For blue/green deployment you just use 2 different tags (e.g. prod-blue / prod-green).

I keep a docker-compose config for developers who only work on one piece of the stack at a time and don't want to deal with the complexities of managing the local development environment for the rest but don't personally use it in development.

For context: I'm a serial technical founder, so time to market is usually the biggest priority for me. Of course, different requirements / career paths are often going to lead to other options being more suitable.

React gets used at work and I see it sometimes being a backend dev. For personal projects prefer Vue+TypeScript.

Flutter/Dart (or perhaps a game engine Unity/Godot) for mobile unless there's specific support that I need more natively.

Actual backend varies depending on the project and can be anything from Go, F#, Kotlin/Javalin/JDBI, Elixir/Phoenix, and an SQL database either PostgreSQL or MySQL, sometimes CockroachDB, or a service like Firebase. TBH, the choice of backend tech doesn't actually matter that much once your application has a working foundation. Adding more usually just means replicating whatever, hopefully good patterns you've already created, and each successive addition gets easier as the foundation or examples to copy from get larger. Even a PHP/Yii project was as manageable as Ruby/Rails if it's rolling and cared-for, but I wouldn't personally choose these as I prefer static typing and don't feel slowed down by it.

Don't have an answer for Desktop, or need. If I did, I'd want something direct and cross-platform, maybe Java FX (or now Flutter).

Why do you prefer Vue over React? Just want to hear opinions on it

The single file components, and in general, less ceremony e.g. props/events. It basically works closer to something I would imagine to have made. vue-stash is also good for small, shared reactive stores.

Ruby on Rails.

Still have yet to find something else that requires such little configuration and is so complete.

I have developed in many languages and on many tech stacks over the years, but this is my favorite so far:

* Linux, Docker, and Ansible (on-prem or cloud; love Linode)

* Postgres (I really like SQL Server, too, but it’s not open source)

* Redis for caching and other transient data

* .NET Core with C# and F#

    Powerful, fast, mature, open source, cross-platform,
    trustworthy 3rd-party libraries, great documentation 
    and support community — what more could you want?

* ASP.NET MVC (WebAPI or Razor views)

* jQuery and Tailwind or Bootstrap, but we use Vue, React, and others as necessary

* GitLab or GitHub; Jenkins or TeamCity if we need discrete CI/CD

* Neovim, VS Code, or Rider (for full IDE); ssh, zsh, and tmux

=> Very productive and stable tool chain for us going on four years now.

   It’s also *extremely scalable*, both with regard to runtime load and code base organization & maintainability.

   Lots of other frameworks and languages that are easy to get started with fall apart when the project gets large and complex.

A few years ago I was Go + GraphQL, but in my experience when your schema is too large it's hard to scale (in terms of code, not performance).

Now I'm using Rust for the backend (its functional aspects make it a perfect choice for writing business logic) which is not REST (more commands oriented, like create_user, create_post, send_email...) and VueJS for the frontend.

Even if it took a little bit of time to learn Rust, I'm extremely satisfied with the productivity of this stack (Far greater than all the other stacks I've experimented)

Go + plain html + plain js + postgres (or mysql) + nginx. If I need something more fancy, then Vue.

no web framework, no template, etc.?

Go includes a simple and great templating library

F# on .NET Core is my favorite right now by a fair margin. It runs anywhere, is extremely fast, and jetBrains Rider is great. The .NET ecosystem has a library for everything, and comes with a lot of batteries included. F# is a great compromise between purely functional and pragmatic.

If not F#, then Haskell comes in second, and Clojure comes in third.

For a web frontend, if it can't be server side rendered templates, then React and Typescript.

I built loads of sites. Both small and very large. Primarily with Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. Recently i'm in the process of building: - https://hundeavl.dk - https://brudensynger.dk - https://indspilning.dk - https://firmaetsynger.dk - https://konfirmandensynger.dk

with ReactJS and a headless CMS with Postgres. I can recommend that stack. Love the NodeJS and JS way more than PHP stuff. For the frontend i've built a custom PostCSS framework thats not bloated.

Good luck!

This is what my main focus is on these days:
- Vue.js
- Tailwind CSS
- GraphQL (I haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet)
- NodeJS (Rust - if I'm feeling adventurous)
- MongoDB (cause it's easy to set up)

I saved up some money and quit my tech job so I can 100% focus on learning these technologies. Right now, I'm focusing on learning the frontend part of this stack.

Django + PostgreSQL. That's it. The frontend is just server-rendered Django templates.

Firebase/ Fluter.

Don't care about Vendor lock-in , or how it actually works. It just does

Dart is such a pleasure

Backend: Elixir preferably, or Go

Transport: GraphQL

Frontend: Tailwind, urql, unpoly, Phoenix LiveView, all JS/TS frameworks are crap, so still waiting for something decent, but otherwise React.

Storage: PostgreSQL

Infra: docker/k8s, Digital Ocean

Vanilla DOM manipulation on the front-end, template strings and a markdown renderer in Node on the back-end, flat-files for storage until I end up needing SQLite or sometimes NeDB. If something ends up being too slow I break it out and rewrite it in C and ship it as WASM.

It isn't my favorite aesthetically but as much as I like the various LISPs, Rust and Haskell/Purescript I use the above nine times out of ten.

Finding KISS solutions for the project. MVP can also be as a simple as a html and vanilla js to nm validate an idea.

Netlify, Svelte, Hasura. Plus a serverless function here or there if really necessary (but usually not)

Rails API + React

Just because after years of being in both ecosystems I am ridiculously productive and don't fall into as many traps. With heroku in 30 mins I could have app deployed production ready with auth, CI, API, database setup, and deployment pipeline.

I'd like to work on a team that uses React on the frontend, Laravel as a thin API backend.

But for personal projects (or an early-stage startup), I would drop React and just use plain old Laravel.

Frontend: Vue (typescript)

Backend: Go or Java (simple and minimalistic REST-ish API, not a lot of framework stuff), via Docker. AWS Lambda for some things.

DB: Postgres (usually managed with AWS RDS)

Used to be a Python backend developer, have used Python, PHP, Javascript and C# on the backend and I'm now pretty invested in Go. It has its cons but is my favorite experience for backend / web services development so far. Environment is easy to setup, compilation is fast, performance is good, language is relatively simple, concurrency feels like a superpower coming from Python and PHP.

Php, mysql/postgres for backend, bootstrap for css and vanilla javascript. Sometime I use react for frontend.

Best experiences for me so far have been: Elm on the front talking to Firebase via ports, and Elm on the front talking to a backend via GraphQL.

Still a fan of relational databases and SQL. I think Rails apps can get out of hand very quickly, but I actually like much of ActiveRecord.

I don’t have one as I rarely have the same problem twice. For example React is great but for simple problems vanilla JS is just fine and I prefer it to avoid a tool chain for example webpack etc.

Back end I’d go with nodejs but if I can get away with a paas maybe I’d use that.

For my content websites: WordPress and Cloudflare.

For my apps:

- React (tsx)

- Fastify

- Postgres w/ Knex

- OpenAPI 3.x w/ TS codegen

- Google Cloud (Run & Functions)

Curious to hear what your CF setup is for WP. Any special performance tricks?

I use the Automatic Platform Optimization tool (with the official CF plugin). I do pay $20 per month for the Pro plan.

That's pretty much it, it handles purging on its own, as well as BYPASSing the cache for signed in users (required for me).

I have another site, much larger (600k page views per month) that I am also going to put behind Cloudflare this week. It does speed up by quite a factor so that's a no brainer.

Appreciate the reply!

Ruby on Rails.

Agreed. After 10 years, Im still a fanboy

Elixir + Phoenix

- Oban for background jobs - Cachex for in-memory caching - Tailwind for styling - Hosted on Gigalixir

This stack is the most productive I've ever been

Nothing beats Svelte and Postgres for most web apps these days. Hasura can be a great addition to PG.

The best stack is the one you know. That said, for elegance and productivity it’s python all the way.

tried multiple stacks for last 12 years, for past two years I am enamored with Haskell + Elm

Heard Elm is a gateway drug to 'All things functional'. Could not get time to explore other than 'Error handling'

You can QCObjects for front-end and back-end in JavaScript for browsers and NodeJs

react, c#, redis for caching+pubsub, mongo/postgres, clickhouse - awesome for analytics/mi, algolia for search, mindsdb, logentries for log aggregation, datadog monitoring + catchpoint for synthetic tests

killer combo

Curious to hear what you use clickhouse for

Backend: Java + Dropwizard + Postgres

Frontend: Typescript, no framework

C++ and Typescript. What else do you really need?

Frontend: Svelte Backend: Java Spring

Frontend: HTML

Backend: Lib/cgi.py

Database: Ext4

LAMP Here(P for Perl) - Glad to see CGI after long time. Perl used to be duct-tape of internet.

For those with a lot of web programming experience, I’m also curious what is the easiest stack in which to achieve good security. I’m also interested in hearing about hosting providers - I would particularly want to support smaller companies (rather than big cloud providers) but am not sure how they do with security, DDoS protection, and other such arcane matters.

I’ve posted our full stack above, but we have had excellent results and zero problems with security (that weren’t our own fault) with .NET Core and Postgres — both are very mature, time-tested, and secure by design.

For hosting, Linode is an independent cloud provider that has secure and reliable service. I’ve heard good things about Digital Ocean, too.

You can use Cloudflare or another specialty company for an extra layer of protection against DDoS attacks and such.

One important note about security and technology, in general:

It is at least as important, if not more so, to configure and use the technology properly as it is to choose any particular one.

There is no software or service whose security can’t be rendered completely ineffective by lack of care or expertise.

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