How do you keep tabs on the ideal tech stack?

Question

The velocity of releases of useful technologies has gone through the roof and I'm finding it hard to keep up. There's enormous churn throughout the 'technical value chain' with established ways of doing things rapidly being supplanted by sometimes far superior novel methods (wrt one or more of time/cost/quality).Some things are easier to keep track of because they're signaled well, such as GitHub Actions, Copilot, Next.js, and Tailwind.CSS. Other useful solutions can be harder to find, such as Astronomer.io.Any advice on strategies would be appreciated!

codingdave · Accepted Answer

Don't.Find a stack that works for you. Stick with it until it doesn't work for you. Do keep an eye out for when it is time to make a change. Do look around if a feature comes up that is difficult on your current stack. But if your product is working on the current tech stack, just let the churn happen while you just keep on workin'

spansoa · Answer

I stick to a baseline of CSS/JS/HTML5 and avoid any flavor of the month software designed for efficiency. Most of those tools (Tailwind etc) are powertools and like bringing a gun to a knife fight. Eventually you will need to do something the framework can't do by itself, and you know, do some CSS (god forbid!).

WalterGR · Answer

I find it so hard to believe that CRUD software is still largely written by hand. In the ideal tech stack, that wouldn't be the case. The stack would have sane defaults from top to bottom, so that you wouldn't need to evaluate every .js and .css.Does that seriously not exist?

nso95 · Answer

Why on earth would you do that?