Published from Publish Studio
Happy New Year! In this article, I shared all the tech I used and going to use this year to build awesome products.
Device
Macbook Pro. I switched to macOS from Windows in 2023. Honestly, for web development, there isn't much difference in terms of dev experience. But I still prefer macOS over Windows and also I love the macOS community. There are a lot of awesome apps/tools built by the community that help you get the most out of your $2000 computer.
Here are my favorites:
IDE/Code Editor
Visual Studio Code. It's unbelievable that still there isn't a serious competition for VS code. It remains my favorite editor every single year. The only thing that I think needs improvement is performance because it becomes slow when working with large projects (e.g. Monorepos) and for some reason, git stops working.
My favorite extensions last year:
Terminal
VS code's built-in terminal with Oh My ZSH! for my Zsh config. I'm a GUI person, so I don't care much about fancy terminals.
AI Tools
GitHub Copilot. I've been using GitHub Copilot for more than 2 years and my productivity has increased a lot. I also tried Supermaven recently. While Supermaven is a lot faster it's not as accurate as Copilot, so I switched back. Also, the ability to choose different models (including Claude) is great.
Publish Studio. Shameless self-promotion :) - I use Publish Studio for my blogging process. It helps me from brainstorming new ideas (with AI!!) to publishing to multiple blogging platforms at once. I literally published this article on Medium, Hashnode, and Dev in a single click.
Frontend
Next.Js. Next.Js is my go-to front-end framework for web apps. But I never use its server-side features (except middleware) because I'm always the separate-frontend-backend guy.
Tailwindcss. This is another thing in my tech stack that I can't replace and I don't have to because it's just awesome. And with Shadcn-UI, it's even better.
State Management
Zustand + Immer. I never used a state management tool because React context API was enough for me until I discovered Zustand last year. It's a simpler and straightforward alternative to Redux.
Backend
NestJS. Last year I tried NestJS for the first time and I regret not trying long ago. It would have saved me a ton of time, not made my code messy, and reduced the amount of code I have to write for basic things that other non-js backend frameworks have built-in.
tRPC. tRPC is great if you love mono repos. It would be nice if they had some kind of support for NestJS. Other downsides include it can't be used for multipart-part/form-data (file uploads) and streaming. I'm going to use this for every project that's not NestJS.
Auth
I roll my own auth and use social connections or Supabase auth when using Supabase.
Database
Postgres (SQL). I use SQL DBs for strictly structured data projects and picked Postgres. I also learned the fact that you can build an entire backend with just Postgres (except the API layer of course).
MongoDB (NoSQL). I use NoSQL DBs for data-heavy projects and MongoDB is my go-to DB.
ORM
Prisma/Drizzle. I like Prisma's schema and migrations features but it looks like a really bad choice for querying because it's too slow. I guess you have to sacrifice one thing for another. And I tried Drizzle last year but this year I going to use it in my next project and see if it's any better. By the way, I wrote a tutorial on Drizzle: Setting Up Drizzle & Postgres with tRPC and Next.js App.
Cloud
Last year I realized you might not never need the cloud unless you have a serious amount of traffic/users/your use case needs tech that only cloud providers can offer like communicating with a satellite in space.
Hosting
Vercel/Netlify. My go-to platforms for front-end hosting.
Railway. My go-to platform for backend/database hosting.
Analytics
Posthog. Posthog has a lot of sub products but I use it mainly for analytics and session replays. I have to say Posthog is an impressive product. Everything from dev experience to dashboards is just awesome. Great to see GA finally got some real competition. I'm looking forward to try all the other products from them.
Payments
Paddle. I'm using Paddle for Publish Studio. I had no issues getting approved, integration, or anything so far. Also, the ability to show prices in local currency and change prices based on purchasing power parity has been a great help. (I recommend this to my fellow Indians who couldn't get a Stripe account.)
Emails
Resend. I've been using Sendgrid for more than 2 years but I switched to Resend recently. Resend provides better value and it's a lot simpler to set up and use. I hope it stays like that.
Observability
Better Stack. I've been using Better Stack for over 1.5 years for logs and website monitoring. It has good APIs, and integrations and works well for me.
Secrets Management
Doppler. I would like to keep all my project secrets in one place and connect to different platforms from there where I want to use them, so it's easy to manage. Doppler helps me with that exact thing.
Feel free to share your stack in the comments 💬 and let me know if I'm missing anything that I might find useful!
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