As a solo developer one of the advantages you have over large incumbents and companies is your ability to rapidly build and test in a real-world environment.
There are no layers of bureaucracy with single developers (or small groups of developers). You can deploy straight to prod because of the most important factor - you have so much more to gain than to lose.
With larger companies, this is reversed. So I would lean into this advantage and you can do that by rapidly prototyping applications. Here's my stack of tools that I feel have helped me speed up development - nothing fancy, and all (mostly) free!
Frontend
For landing pages I use Astrobuilt
For the actual app interface I use a NextJS Boilerplate that I've used on previous projects (I don't bother with latest versions because the user doesn't care)
Deploying the app and landing page I use Vercel as it has a free tier to deploy straight from GitHub and site analytics which is a win
Backend
Depending on complexity I got for either Supabase (If I have a basic CRUD app)or for more complicated backends I go with a trusty Django Boilerplate with authentication APIs already setup and a PostgreSQL database.
Deploying the backend I use Railway as the interface is really clean and it's significantly cheaper than and (and in my opinion just easier to use than Heroku)
That's it! Using this I can get a landing page up within 30 minutes and an MVP inside 2 weeks (which is my general target). Would be interesting to hear other people's stacks for rapid prototyping!
Top comments (1)
what's the point of rapid prototyping?