Tech stack
Tech stack
Let me tell you about the technical stack I use to build products and iterate fast
Currently I run around 11 websites.
Some of them are trivial blogs (like StrictMode or VimFromScratch).
Others are more sophisticated products (like MindThis or Candl).
Most of those are powered by the same tech stack. This tech stack works for me mostly because it allows me to build websites fast.
The “time to production” is the single most important factor for me. I want to be able to implement ideas quickly, iterate, and move on.
Hosting
To host my projects I mostly use Scaleway which is a European cloud provider with datacenters in France and Netherlands. It’s mostly on the cheaper side.
For example, a new project can start with the DEV1-M machine (3 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM) costs about $6,5 / month.
A managed (they do the backups for you, etc.) PostgreSQL instance starts from ~$12 / month.
So launching a new product can easily cost less than $20 per month.
Rails
Ruby on Rails might be not as popular as it used to be among devs (and I partially understand why), still it’s incredibly productive.
I just can’t name any other framework (maybe Phoenix?) that would be on par with Rails in terms of developer productivity. Everything you ever possibly could need is already there either in the Rails itself, or within the reach in the ecosystem.
Smarter people than me already thought through many use cases a typical web app would need. It becomes apparent when I try using other server-side frameworks like Express with Node. There’s just so much dull manual labor for many things that are trivial with Rails.
The only thing I don’t buy (at least for now) is how they manage the frontend, and I mostly opt-out in favor of React.
React
No surprises here. On frontend these days I mostly use React. I don’t believe there’s something special about React other than the fact that I know it, and thus I can be more productive using it instead of Vue or Angular.
Well, I guess biggest strength of React is its popularity. There’s a good chance you can find a solution to any problem on the internet, and the ecosystem is very mature. It’s a safe choice.
Next.js + Vercel
I started playing with Next.js and Vercel as an experiment, and I was completely blown away. Now I usually use it to host static websites, like landing pages like for MindThis. JustFeed (https://app.justfeed.io/) uses it
Vercel does a fantastic job by providing a phenomenal user experience. Any project can be deployed from Github in a matter of seconds along with HTTPS certificates, automatic previews from branch, etc. And all this on a free tier!
Next.js is just a great way to build static websites with proper HMR.
I usually work on two monitors. The browser is open in one of them, and the editor in the other. As soon as I make changes, I immediately see my changes reflected on the screen.
This is one of the reason I don’t directly use frontend with Rails - there’s no easy way to get that similar setup.
Recently, as an experiment I also rewrote an entire app in Next.js. This is a classical SPA, with the /api layer handled by Next.js instead of Rails, and I actually used recently announced Vercel Postgres service as a database. It works quite well, but I’m not entirely sure how much will it cost me 😅…We’ll see how this turns out.
Thanks for reading!
P.S.: Please do let me know what would you like to learn more about.