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Developer Tools

2023 revision​

  • FE: NextJs + TailwindCSS
  • BE:
    • Express for complex large application => [[NextJs#NextJs for Backend | When not use NextJs for backend]]
    • NextJS for simple API
  • Communication:
    • tRPC + NextJs for simple solo project (read [[Random thoughts (tech)#tRPC | here]])
    • REST with separated BE/FE on different for larger project
  • Bootstrap app
    • If use NextJS fullstack => Manual but in the same repo, create-t3-app default to use PlanetScale, which we don't want
    • Otherwise, traditional bootstrap FE and BE seperately
  • ORM:
    • Prisma: Matured but the query engine is sometimes questionable, a lot of feature, plugin, etc => Generally good but not really performant
    • Drizzle: Still in beta, not matured
    • Kysely: Best of both world of Prisma and Drizzle, typesafe and good DX, while maintaining raw SQL performant. Can also combined with Prisma to use its migration engine and then use prisma-kysely packages to generate kysely types => A little bit more setup than Prisma but really worth considering
      • Worth mentioning that we should not always rely on kysely codegen packages or similar, we can use it as a reference point but we should always keep a version inside our code and use it to init kysely instead of the generated one in node_modules => Have more control over our types
  • Authentication: Auth.JS/NextAuthJS/Clerk
  • Logging: Axiom
  • Deployment:
    • Vercel for NextJS
    • Render/Railway for BE ExpressJs
  • Database: Neondb/RDS
  • Others: Upstash
    • Redis, CRONs, event queues, kafka, rate limiting, and so much more.
  • Knock.app for notifications

2023 version​

  • Tools that help boost solo developer productiviy

    • Deployment: Vercel (this is only for FE, what about BE?)
    • BE Deployment: Render? (looks pretty good, but concern about spinning down on idle) or also look into Railway
    • Database: Planetscale (MySQL but the developer experience is good?) => As MySQL does not support Vector type => Look more into Neondb or good old RDS
    • Logging: Axiom (already has integration with Vercel)
    • Others (cache, rate limit, integration etc): Upstash

  • Tech stacks

    • FE + BE: NextJS => Second though: only for FE (as NextJS backend is serverless, which has some limitations)
      • Serverless has short time out on each request, which is only around few seconds
      • Serverless can't handle websocket
      • Should not use really complex logic
    • BE: ExpressJs
    • Communications: tRPC
    • Bootstrap app: create-t3-app => Nope, as it is too opinionated and relies heavily on NextJs => Still go with traditional seperate FE and BE repo
    • Prisma/Drizzle
    • Tailwind CSS
    • Auth.JS/NextAuthJS/Clerk
    • Astro for static site
    • Turborepo

  • Other tools

    • Excalidraw => Drawing, diagraming
    • Notion
    • Linear => Project/task tracking

  • Sources