Why Your Tech Stack Doesn't Matter

about tech stacks

A tech stack is a set of technologies grouped together to build a project. it can be a combination of programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools. The frontend community (including myself) is obsessed with bleeding-edge technologies popping up every week that aren't even production-ready yet and spending the next week migrating their whole codebase for fun.

There's nothing wrong with following the latest trends. However, in majority of cases, it's most likely distracting you from your main goals.

my experience

Earlier, I mentioned that I'm addicted to building todo apps that serve no purpose with every new frontend framework that comes out. There's a thing called the tutorial hell where you can't start something of your own without following a tutorial. I think that there is a good correlation between these two concepts.

I've created a ton of simple projects in: React, Vue, Svelte, Solid.js, HTMX, Astro and there is much more that I can't remember right now. There are 2 problems with this approach:

1. Result: No matter in which JavaScript framework you build your web app, users will never know. All they see is the resulting app. And the main goal is: to ship a useful product to users.
2. Purpose: Most of the times when you try out a new library/framework there is a quickstart guide that you follow along. And this is where your introduction to the technology ends with. That quickstart guide in the docs. This is not original, nor useful. It's a waste of time.

just ship it.

It took me nearly 3 years to come to realization that you don't need a different pen to write a brilliant essay. What matters is the content of your writing, and in this case the only important thing you need to focus on is the idea.

Great ideas don't need a fancy design, a blazingly-fast programming language, a 1ms faster database or complicated analytics. Experience goes to show that you can build the next Google with just an Excel document. Be your first user, get feedback from people and enjoy solving problems.