Preface
Nine years ago I co-founded an agency called visuellverstehen here in Germany. We have steadily grown and are now 25 people strong. Looking back I would really like to get an overview how our tech stack has changed over time. Unfortunately we do not have any data about that.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. — Origin unknown
That is why we are starting this series about our tech stack now – and plan to publish it yearly.
Big firms use technology radars. I first stumbled upon this on ThoughtWorks and really liked the idea. We are too small to create such a comprehensive resource, but we are able to list the technologies we use. And that is what we are going to do.
Clarification
This will not cover every technology in all of our projects, because individual projects do need individual solutions. But it will cover all the basics.
Legacy projects might use outdated technologies and those will not be part of this. Of course, we always try to update legacy projects.
It is not easy to categorize every technology. Therefore the categorization might not always be 100 % correct.
Not every one of us is working with all of the technologies mentioned below. Our team is organized into smaller sub-teams, which then focus on different projects.
Our tech stack
Core products
- Individual digital products using Laravel and Vue.js
- Content management products using Statamic and TYPO3
- E-commerce products using Shopware
What people call »Backend«
- Extbase
- Laravel
- Laravel Nova
- MySQL
- PHP
- PHPUnit
- Shopware
- Statamic
- TYPO3
What people call »Frontend«
- Antlers
- BEM
- Babel
- Blade
- CSS
- Cypress
- Fluid
- HTML
- JavaScript
- Laravel Livewire
- Sass
- Tailwind CSS
- Twig
- Vue.js
- gulp.js
- npm
- webpack
What people call »DevOps«
- Docker
- Docker Compose
- Git
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab
- GitLab CI
- Hetzner Cloud
- Laravel Forge
- Mittwald
Honorable mentions
Three things are worth a special mention.
We are moving all of our websites and web applications from shared hosting to Laravel Forge and Hetzner Cloud. Kubernetes was on our minds, but we decided against it.
We are moving from gulp.js to only webpack, because we want to make things as simple as possible. If we can get rid of gulp.js, web developers must only learn about one and not two technologies.
Our tech stack is more diverse than ever. We know that using less software is definitely the way to go. Nevertheless we added some major new technology (e. g. Statamic, Tailwind CSS and Laravel Livewire) to our portfolio last year. This has open interesting doors.
So let me ask you this:
What does your tech stack look like? Do you focus on too many technologies? How do you handle legacy projects? How do you keep technology simple?
I am curious how this will change in the next twelve months. Well, we will find out. See you next year. Happy coding.
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