Ask HN: Freelance website builders/maintainers, what's in your 2024 toolkit?

Language: Typescript.

Frontend Framework: Astrojs [1] or qwik [2]

Frontend Library: React if it requires 3d and other frame-motion like animations, else will not use any frontend library or might throw solidjs if required for some state etc.

Backend: Cloudflare functions, google functions

Auth: Lucia-Auth [3] if required

IDE: VS code with neovim , once deployed to git, I might some time use code-spaces

CSS: DaisyUI [4] with tailwind or Bulma

CSS Library: TailwindUI [5] makes most of the components ready to use and comes from the makers

CMS: Astro content collections or Sanity [6]

Deployment: Cloudflare (Highly preferred) or linode/digitalocean/netlify

Database: turso [7] or neon postgres [8] with (drizzle orm) or cloudflare durable objects

1. https://github.com/withastro/astro

2. https://github.com/BuilderIO/qwik

3. https://github.com/lucia-auth/lucia

4. https://github.com/saadeghi/daisyui

5. https://tailwindui.com/

6. https://www.sanity.io/

7. https://turso.tech/

8. https://neon.tech/

Also huge fan of firebase and their emulators and whole eco-system.

I have an employer, and we work with a particular stack, but if I was doing my own thing I would work native each an every time... If you work with apps, xcode and Swift, Android? Android Studio and Kotlin/Java, Windows desktop? Windows Forms and .NET %CURRENT_DOTNET_ITERATION%... Web? pick a solid framework with tons of support and libraries, django, rails, phoenix, et al. Minimize the use of JS libraries/frameworks or remove altogether, forget about fads that mix markup with javascript and logic, and even style (these days). Do not build stuff based on a web browser just so you can call it multi-platform, you will end up shipping a crappy abstraction with a poor UI and even worse performance, because remember, you are playing solo, cant afford the optimizations of large product teams, be pragmatic... deployments/CICD/devops DIY, don't trust services that advertise themselves as a panacea for deployments, remember Heroku f* everyone sideways... learn and use stuff like Dokku or Kamal...

Mostly I just use Django alone with nothing on top, not even a frontend framework.

I implemented a few custom authentication classes for things like group permissions on read / write for shared projects internally and just hooking this all up means I can write huge new modules that “just” slot in, in just a few hours. IMO they have the abstraction layers just right, it makes me really productive.