June 28, 2023
As of the time of this writing, we are currently focused on our first project: Friendscape. Just this morning we were still flip-flopping on the name so TBD if it sticks but we like it a lot! I won't get into the whys on that just this second, we're here to talk tech stacks babeeee.
Tried & True
I crawled and fought my way out of a sales career and I've spent the last 5 years getting real familiar with the MERN stack, which is made up of:
- MongoDB
- Express
- React
- Node
These are all great tools & frameworks and it was my first stack I truly became familiar with so it's got a soft spot in my heart. That being said, it certainly has its limitations and since I was so familiar with it, I was hesitant to branch out too far for whatever reason. Maybe I was afraid of not being able to do what I know I can do in React or maybe I just didn't want to spend too much time in docs. In any event, it wasn't doing me any favors and I really felt a drive to dig into some new frameworks.
The New New
Hello, Gatsby. Hello, nextjs. Why has it taken me so long to say hello to you both? I really like the things you do. I like that you can do server-side rendering and take care of all of my routing headaches. Server Components? I mean, I've never used them but I have friends that have. Sure I'll give 'em a shot. Oh, the first ones are free?
I'm embarassed to say it's taken me so long to dig into these frameworks, although I think I'm growing up because this was the first time I can really picture having a use-case before finding the stack. Granted, Mike and I did do a first bulldozer-type MVP where we just coded and coded without designing anything and it helped me uncover a lot of shortcomings in the vanilla MERN stack that we needed to address. The issues I was coming across were in data fetching, routing, and changing page metadata, which is so much easier with nextjs.
Spit it out, what's the stack?
Yeah that was a lot of words without telling you what we're actually developing in and now that I'm typing it out, it really doesn't seem like we're straying too far from the MERN stack but we have the tools we need! We're currently developing our first product in:
- Nextjs - Front-end
- Express & Node - API Server
- MongoDB - Data
Boom baby. That's the stack, don't wear it out.