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Ask HN: How do you keep tabs on the ideal tech stack?

8 points by rebelos ↗ HN
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!

11 comments

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WalterGR
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?

mettamage
Java has some scaffolding options
codingdave
There are heaps of low code tools, no code tools, boilerplate generators, and frameworks that abstract the details out. Is there something else that you envisioned that is not encompassed by those solutions?
WalterGR
I meant frameworks specifically - i.e. something that's 'full-code' but doesn't just emit some boilerplate to get you started.

Are there frameworks that will give you - for example - a full CRUD app given data definitions? Bonus points for things like accounts and permissioning. I don't know of any but would absolutely love to be proven wrong.

hunter2_
While it's by no means the best tool for every job, Drupal fits nicely into this category, including bonus points. Out of the box, you can model your entities with whatever types of fields and relationships you want, and grant very granular CRUD permissions to arbitrary roles that in turn get granted to users.
WalterGR
Where does Drupal lie on the continuum between framework and no-code / CMS, though?

If I'm using Drupal, do I start with code or do I start with a web UI? If I need to tweak something, am I modifying my code or someone else's component?

hunter2_
Squarely "framework" for most sites where Drupal makes sense because if you're not doing something custom you're probably using something else entirely, but you can really get far without writing anything yourself.

An installation gets you a pile of code ("core") that you never touch, which is enough to establish the schema of a database resulting in the ability to do many things through the web UI. If you want to do more things, you add more code, either "contrib" (maintained by the community, kind of like a distant cousin to npm packages) or custom (write it yourself, but only create new files that invoke core/contrib hooks, don't modify core/contrib files). The more contrib/custom code you add, the more that the web UI lets you do, typically.

It begins as a basic CMS and ends up as a bespoke CMS and/or something that doesn't even resemble a CMS, depending on what you do with it. At some point in the middle of the process, you may approach and then whiz past a CMS roughly as powerful as WordPress.

WalterGR
Awesome, thanks for your response!
spansoa
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!).
codingdave
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'

nso95
Why on earth would you do that?