What’s a good tech stack today? I don’t care.

I’m a big fan of PHP/Laravel for a while now. I’ve also coded a lot in Node/JavaScript/TypeScript and Vue. I like GraphQL, I enjoy using Tailwind CSS and I think Vite is amazing. That’s where I’m coming from.

But I felt the fear of missing out. Just recently I’ve set up a project with Node, Vue and GraphQL. And I hate Node.

Running npm install seems to have a 50 % chance to succeed on my machine. It’s just causing random issues I don’t even understand. Is that really what the cool kids are still using today?

But I must admit I also love Node. You can start with a single file, install some packages and design your own structure and APIs. It feels very … free. With all the upsides and downsides of freedom. While I wouldn’t start a PHP project without Laravel, I don’t hesitate to start a Node project without a framework.

Anyway, I’d love to look at something completely new. Over the last months I’ve learned Swift UI. It’s cool and all, but I don’t enjoy mobile apps enough to stick with it. I gave React another chance and I can build stuff with it, but I don’t enjoy it.

Also, I’m not in the phase of my life to invest that much time into learning everything about a completely different ecosystem. When I write JavaScript or PHP, I’m in the flow pretty quickly. My fingertips fly over the keyboard, and most of the time it just works.

I don’t want to be that guy thinking about the tech stack too much. I use what helps me to achieve my goal. I don’t even see my self as a “developer”. It’s just that code helps me to bring my ideas to life. I should probably ignore my fear of missing out (and you, too) and accept to be a JavaScript/PHP person for now, as long as it helps me to build cool stuff.

While thinking about all that I noticed something else: I won’t start a project without a code linter/formatter (or what you call those tools) anymore.

Whatever it is: ESLint/xo for JavaScript, PHP-CS-Fixer/Laravel Pint for PHP. It’s one of the first things I set up. It’s just too cool to throw some code in the editor, hit save, and see it to format well automatically or – in some cases — even rewritten for you.