Ask HN: Companies of one, what is your tech stack?

Each year for the last two years I have asked companies of one, meaning companies that consists of only one person of what tech stacks you use. Feel free to link to your site or project for show case if you want.

Here is the last two threads:

(2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25465582

(2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024041

What is your tech stack?

Why did you choose it?

Do you think your choices had any impact on your success?

Thanks in advance!

If I start something new this year I think I would opt for Rails again. Even though it’s long in the tooth nowadays, I would choose it for productivity, time to market and availability of people if the project scales.

I have a long term itch that I want to scratch soon, whether it's possible to dispose of PostgreSQL and just store my data in an S3 compatible object store and yet still have a SQL interface to it. https://blevesearch.com/ is on my list of things to look into for this. I'd already structured the PostgreSQL schema with the possibility of putting individual tables into an object store, but as my databases grow I'm keen to avoid becoming a DBA and I don't use most PostgreSQL features so if I have the chance to reduce my tech stack to just Go I may take it.

What I've learned from having a mix of Python + Django + some NPM... bitrot and maintaining dependencies is a debt that you have to start paying way too soon. Originally only the API was in Go, but that is the one part that over years has required virtually no debt paydown due to the language, environment, dependencies. You can leave a Go application for 8 years and all you need do is compile it to the latest Go and everything works perfectly... I can't even run or upgrade Python apps from half that time ago without major work to bring it up to date. As the side projects proliferated or grew, it is less overall effort for me to rewrite in Go than maintain everything else.

Fronted mostly static with Stimulus + Hotwire for a few dynamic parts.

Images via S3 + Imgix.

Metabase (also on Heroku) for analytics.

Trying to keep it as simple as possible. Not quite successful yet, but pleased with the tech stack so far.

Deployment: Docker Compose. It's great to just set a DOCKER_HOST environment variable and I can deploy to any server with Docker installed.

Backend: a Go service. Could be any language really but that's what I know. Just takes requests, does some business logic and returns HTML templates.

Frontend: I'm not a frontend dev so I try to avoid it as much as possible. For UI, I use Bulma (a pretty comprehensive bunch of CSS components), with a tiny sprinkling of vanilla JS for small client-side animations (e.g. burger menu toggles). For any user action that hits the backend, I use https://htmx.org/ and just return a small HTML snippet as the API response. No point using client-side JS for that (no latency gains and makes the tech stack less homogenous).