Ask HN: What is your most productive tech stack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your most productive tech stack?

8 pointsMathCodeLove16 comments

Just curious what tools the HN crowd is using in the year of 2022 and feel they are at their most productive with.

Even though it's not out of beta yet, I feel really productive using SvelteKit. It's the first framework that I've used in 15 years of programming and said "Ahh, finally". I use it in production and am going to release a SaaS starter kit for other folks to use so they don't have to build all the same features every app needs: https://sveltesaas.com/

If you'll indulge me as I wax poetic: Things I like about SvelteKit: none of the front-end/back-end plumbing you usually need to do with JS/HTML/CSS, can use JS/TS throughout the entire stack, filesystem-based routing is so easy to use and maintain, performant and SEO-optimized server-rendered routes with automatic client-side hydration, optional client-side routing for optimal performance, can specify statically-generated pages per route (marketing site and app are all part of one bundle), super fast dev experience.

And Svelte itself is awesome too: Svelte components run super fast (no virtual DOM), have tiny build sizes, stellar interactive documentation, and the developer experience is fire. Svelte was also just voted the #1 most loved web framework in the 2021 Stack Overflow developer survey (it beat out React, Rails, Django, Spring, Laravel, etc): https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

Rails 6 API with React frontend, Postgres database, hosted on Heroku.

I've been using some version of this stack for different projects, across companies, for several years and it's an absolute joy. It's only gotten more refined and streamlined over the years.

Nice! How is the Rails API? I've hears great things about the MVC framework but not as much about using it as an API. Any major drawbacks?

Admittedly I don't have many alternates to compare to, but it's wonderful. It's essentially the best parts of Rails MVC (M and C), which gives just enough out of the box (ActiveStorage for attachment management, ActiveJob for background jobs, ActiveRecord for ORM, ActionMailer for emails) to allow developers to focus on writing business logic without getting bogged down with some of the lower level implementation details, while also remaining flexible. Excellent framework coupled with a beautiful language (ruby).

Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS make me feel like I can deploy just about anything in a way that will scale for a very long time.

Usually I put python and flask on top of that. Though I always feel like I should be switching to Django or possibly Go.

I've also been experimenting with Nix lately. That feels like it's going to be a way to do even smoother and more predictable deploys using the same stack.

For me its Java with Spring or maybe something like Micronaut. Its what I'm most familiar with. Plus the massive Java ecosystem means I can probably find a library to do just about anything.

Database would be MySQL or Postgres. The application containers would run on something like Google Cloud Run, other serverless options are available.

AWS, but thats because significant portions of my life have been spent debugging, fixing, and automating large scale AWS services

Could you please give me (a person who just started learning and using AWS) few tips and advices about how to become AWS professional and other info that you think it is important for me to know?

I have good prior programming experience with Python and R, and mostly work in data science projects.

Thank you.

Properly done AWS is always infrastructure as code, so learn CDK. Becoming proficient in building services where everything is wired by CDK will basically force you to understand the operating model of AWS and the building blocks. You essentially have:

IAM/Security -> Grant access between services

Networking/VPC -> Open interfaces between services

Services themselves -> S3/DynamoDB/Lambda

From there, you realize everything kinda follows the same pattern, and you can rely on the CDK typescript type system to chain and link things together.

From there, focus on microservice architectures, distributed coordination of writes to Dynamo DB from lambdas, when to use containers, etc

Thank you so much! Your comment opens eys on many things in AWS for me and is very valuable.

For me, it's Go, probably hosted on AWS. I've been building my productivity with TypeScript and JS as well, but I'm still a bit less sure of my skills there so I wouldn't say it's the most productive. I'm getting there!

NextJS is quite nice, solves a lot of problems with React. Flutter is nice as well.

For me it's Lazarus/Free Pascal/GIT on a windows machine.

Classic LAMP stack with P as in PHP, preferably with Server Side Rendering.

Still to this day nothing beats it even if you go barebones because everything you need is included out of the box.

Rails API-mode and GraphQL with codegen cranking out typed React components/hooks.

Django with server side templates + unpoly or htmx + postgres (managed)

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