What Tech Stacks are Folks Using for New Projects?

I'm doing a bit of research for an upcoming article and potential content for a book down the road and I'm wondering what types of tech stacks people are looking at when starting a new project.

Example tech stacks would include:

• MEAN / MERN / MEVN
• .NET 5 Back End / Vue.js Front End / SQL Server Database
• PHP / MariaDB

I'm also curious what considerations you make when choosing a tech stack, though I understand for the vast majority of organizations a legacy tech stack is already in place.

I'm curious to see the variety of backgrounds you all have on this one as well as which are the most popular, so please comment and upvote other comments that represent your stacks well.

Comments

[guledali]

For any hobby & passion project most important tool I use is Ruby on Rails, it empowers the solo developer and the framework include so much of the box while at the same time being very opinionated which is good for beginners. I tell people once you understand the basics of rails, it's absolutely a magnificent framework but yeah let's get started here.

• Tech-Stack) Ruby on Rails, in fact I use jumpstartrails.com/
• CSS-framework) Tailwind UI & Tailwind CSS
• CI) TravisCI or Github Actions
• CD) Heroku easy to setup with rails
• Database) Pg, Postgres most of the time I write ActiveRecord
• Testing) Minitest and Fixtures build into rails
• Design-Tool) Refactoring UI, wireframe.cc, balsamiq & figma
• IDE) RubyMine + VIM, vscode sucks with Ruby

Services:

• file-upload), ActiveStorage AWS S3
• email), ActionMailer SendGrid
• background-job) ActiveJob Sidekiq Heroku Redis, I don't use this feature often only when I'm sending emails like confirmation emails and reset password. Rails has like deliver.now and deliver.later method. Particularly deliver.later is putting the job in a que which is good for the server and this why I think rails is so powerful at the end of the day, even a novice developer like me can put out a production ready web application without knowing that much.

JavaScript framework
No! I don't use any JavaScript framework at all for my hobbies and pet projects but,
I do like StimulusJS 2.0 framework very easy to use in small projects it gives me a lot of throwback to the jQuery days, oh much simpler times.

[André Rodrigues Melo]

"oh much simpler times". I empathize a lot with that!

[ShinaBR2]

I'm not sure what mean MEAN/MERN/MEVN to be honest.

My stack is:

• Postgres database
• Hasura is a simple, single solution for an authorized backend development
• Firebase for Authentication and Cloud Functions to work with Hasura
• Gatsbyjs for frontend development.

They are the main things. You can read more in my old post.

[Matt Eland]

ME*N is Mongo Express Angular/Vue/React Node

[ShinaBR2]

Oh I see, I started with that stack for multiple years ago, but for now, not anymore because of Hasura. 3factor architecture is the best for me.

[Priyatham Sai Chand]

I choose MERN as my first project. I am trying to build a web app for my friends' startup idea and wanted to make it with a buddy. Since it's a small personal one i had all the time to learn by doing.

I had no idea on any of them and choosed MERN after watching a few YouTube videos on the topic

Let me talk about MEAN, MERN and MEVN

MongoDb was something i knew nothing of. I only knew RDBMS from college courses and wanted to try this out.

Had no choice on Express so went with the flow.

Choosing React was the tricky part. I had to compare with others. Vue is easy people said but i thought it's relatively new.
"What if i couldn't find answers to my question on stackoverflow" fear crept in.
Angular exists from long but i heard (guess) its too huge and wasn't really appropriate for new projects.

Although i heard about Node never tried it. Its popular so why not.

After starting a month ago, i feel good about my choice now and getting better.

Do people agree? Or want to change my opinion?

[MeStrak]

Standard web tech stack for most of my projects:

• Backend: NestJS - very well structured NodeJS framework encouraging good app architecture
• Frontend: Vue.js - easy learning curve for new developers, paired with Vuetify to create nice layouts quickly
• API: GraphQL - because it can do everything REST can and more
• Database - depends on the project

[P Giri Kishore]

Why isn't Django preferred for full stack development?

[guledali]

Django is Awesome

[Nikola Stojaković]

Personally I would never use Django since I don't like Python (although my first framework was RoR which is very similar).

[pharmokan]

NEAT STACK

• NETLIFY
• ELEVENTY
• ALPINEJS
• TAILWIND CSS

neat-starter.netlify.app/

[Alexis Rochon]

I really want to try this one. It looks so lightweight, so simple, so efficient.

[Margo McCabe]

A lot of folks are using HarperDB for new projects as well, it might be worth checking out! (HERN is the new MERN, but maybe I'm slightly biased 🙂)

[Gregor Dzierzon]

Hi Matt,

This is a great question. I've actually thought a lot about this topic. I will dabble with several variations of this just because I love learning, but here is my go-to response if I am starting an actual dev project.

.NET 5 / ASP.NET MVC with vanilla JavaScript / SQL Server
or
.NET 5 / Angular / SQL Server

I've used Mongo on a couple of enterprise projects, but we chose mongo specifically because the data was not structured. Mongo would not be my go-to default.

[Raman Sharma]

No code tools like Bubble. Game changer.

[Mischa Spiegelmock]

This is some of what I've been using for Python/React serverless projects along with starter kits: dev.to/cybermischa/python-2020-mod...