Technologies I Like to Promote

What I Love to Use What is also great
  • Supabase because they provide you with exceptional tools to simplify your apps. They've built a Rust written GraphQL extension for Postgres pg_graphql, take care of authentication for you, provide a realtime service, have good support and are open source.
  • htmx if you know your craft you can build really fast, very scalable SPA feeling apps with htmx.
  • BunnyCDN offers a very good CDN service at very affordable rates and can protect you from DDOS attacks, as well as handle TLS certificates for https.
  • Hetzner offers cheap and affordable cloud hosting with much lower rates than major cloud providers. Look into Fedora CoreOS / RHEL CoreOS if you want to host with Podman, look into Alpine Linux / Flatcar Container Linux if you want to host with Docker, look into Talos Linux, K3s, K0s or MicroK8s if you want to host with Kubernetes.
Other thoughts
  • UI Frameworks - They change a lot, often send large JS bundles, are not necessarily small, bloat your app with JS or TypeScript, are really great at being component oriented, some like React use Virtual DOM which adds for web development too much complexity for simple DOM interactions and could be slower. Less abstractions are better.
    If you have to use a UI Framework, I recommend Svelte 5 right now and comparing different syntaxes and ways of doing things on Component Party.
  • GraphQL I really love GraphQL easiness, development iteration, teamwork etc., but I think the tooling is not there yet if you lack funds, want realtime data or the most performant API/UI. Queries can be exploited more easily, queries need to be parsed etc. all that adds time to serving your requests. Hasura is probably a great option and offers subscriptions, but at a cost.
    And pg_graphql really offers a fast way to access GraphQL and comes integrated with Supabase but doesn't have subscriptions yet.
    Also I like how they expose your database schema functions, but there is still some work to be done as of now.
    For very large teams it's a viable solution, for small teams it's too big of a setup.
  • gRPC with Protobuf sounds performant.
  • Caching if you can cache your API or similar, this can greatly enhance performance. For example these posts can be cached with BunnyCDN.
  • Reduce complexity in every way. If you have everything GraphQL, Svelte, Database, Auth, Clustering, Containers, Gateways, Authentication server etc. you realize that making changes takes long, even if you have the best stack. It's not always the best idea to use the best most performant, newest or most trendy tech. Let's take a look. Server Side Rendering prerenders JS on the server this increases load, Hot Module Reload in browser is often slow, UI Frameworks create big JS Bundles thereby big initial load times, TypeScript is dynamically typed and can not always infer some big recursive types leaving your app exposed to bugs, incremental static builds will give you static websites but the more posts your blog has, the longer you will build and the longer it takes.
    So by throwing away most JS but the one that is needed for interactivity e.g. with HTMX, load times get better, SEO is better, website sizes are reduced, development times are reduced, abstractions are reduced, code is reduced and bugs are reduced.
  • PWAs. If anyone build a general app it should be a web app. The browser can just do anything and the UI is not limited, views are yours and don't need to change and it can run anywhere. Once the concept is finished and people like using it then it makes sense to add an App. Building an app upfront in Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS that is general and does not need to run natively (e.g. file explorers) will set you up for vendor-lock in and thereby also less users. It makes sense to first proof the concept and then add dependencies.
  • Relational Algebra. Math is a language, if we can speak it we can do amazing things.
  • Running your own server with DynDNS to escape the cloud.
  • Coding challenges to improve your fine-tuned skills.

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