My Current Tech Stack

Hey guys. So, I've been getting a lot of questions lately about what tech stack I'm using for my own projects. And I figured that this would be a good topic for a video is going over my dev to deployment stack. There's so many options out there. And if you're kind of struggling to to find a combination of technologies that works for you, then maybe this will help you out. And I I also want to say that just because this is what I'm using right now doesn't mean this is what I'll use all you know forever. And also it doesn't mean that it's what will work for you either. It's just what works for me and what I build. So let's get into it. [Music] All right. So I've been a developer for about 20 years or so and a content creator for about half of that. So, I've experimented with hundreds of of different technologies from programming languages to frameworks to smaller libraries, tools, utilities, and and just a lot of different technologies. Some I've loved, some I've hated. Uh I've changed my my main stack dozens of times throughout the years as well. And this is just what I'm using right now. So, for my language, I'm using Typescript with strict mode. And I do I I do a lot of tutorials and courses in JavaScript. But just about any project, personal project that I create, especially one of any size, is going to be using TypeScript. And to tell you the truth, I actually hated TypeScript at first. I didn't think it was really a good return on investment as far as, you know, the extra code that I had to write. But over time, especially as projects got bigger and and more complex, I started to really see the value in Typescript. And I saw that it was catching errors before they made it to production. The IntelliSense is great. It's self-documenting and and makes your code more descriptive and uh easier to read. Also, it's just really become the norm. I mean, if you jump into any goodsized either front end or or Node.js project, it's probably going to be using TypeScript. So, for my framework, I'm using Nex.js, of course, with React. Um, now I'm not saying that React is above all. It's not I'm not saying it's the best front-end framework out there. I basically use it because it's what I know the the most. I do know Vue and Angular and some others, but I would say I'm most comfortable with React. So that's what I choose for most of my my personal projects. Uh I also love just the ecosystem that includes the meta framework that I use which is Nex.js. Um if it's a small tool that I'm building uh I'll use React and Vit like I like I just created a um a JavaScript bundle analyzer which has like two routes and I didn't need any SEO or anything like that. I just needed a something with a snappy UI. So, I built it as a spa with React and V. But for larger applications, as long as it's not like a back-end API project where I'd use Express, uh, I'll use Nex.js in most cases and create API routes or server actions. Um, all my pages are rendered on the server unless it needs, you know, hooks or events and some kind of interactivity and then it'll be a client component. But Nex.js is is very performant. It's popular. It's easy to use, so that's why I use it. Now, for styling, I use Tailwind CSS, and occasionally I'll use Shad CN UI, which is a a UI library with style components that you can install and customize. Uh, I usually just use Tailwind, though. Outside of tutorials and courses, I don't think I've written CSS in maybe two years or so. Tailwind just just takes the load off. Uh I know you end up with a lot of classes in your HTML and your JSX and your templates but I I think it's a small price to pay in my opinion. All right, so let's get to the database. Uh I'm using Postgres specifically from Neon database which is a cloud hosting service and they have sponsored me in the past but that's only because I approached them because I love their product. Uh I did use MongoDB for for years but the the charges just became ridiculous. So for production projects, I was getting build thousands and even for the demo app for my my Mstack course, which was the the Pro Shop e-commerce app, um that was racking up $600 per month. And and that was just a demo for people to check out. It wasn't even like a like a real production app. So it just it just got too expensive. And and Neon has steady pricing and it's much easier to work with. uh I use their branching so if I'm in production I don't have to mess with the main branch and risk screwing up my data or anything like that. Now when it comes to OMS and and connecting and interacting with the Postgres database I use Prisma. Now you could use a lot of different tools here. Uh Drizzle is another one that I like. I really just ended up using Prisma kind of by chance. Um I liked it and it's easy to use. So that's that's just what I know best now. And um it's easy to model your data, run migrations. It has a tool called Prisma Studio where you can see and manage all your data. So it does just about everything that I need it to. Now for deployment, it depends on the project. For the most part, I'm using Versell when I'm using Nex.js. Uh Versell is they're actually the creators of Nex.js, and they just have a lot of different features. They have built-in continuous deployment. So all you have to do is push to the main branch of your GitHub repo or GitLab and it will run the build process and if it passes it will get deployed. It's just ridiculously simple, you know, and and I come from the days of of FileZilla, FTP, and and C panel. And it's it's crazy to see how far we've come from dragging and dropping your entire project into an FTP window and waiting 45 minutes for it to upload and not having any backup, no version control if something goes wrong. Now, for testing, when I do write tests, which isn't all that often, I'll use justest. And for any automation like running those tests, linting or or or building before deployment, then I'll use GitHub actions. So that's really the my main stack that I'm using. As far as AI assistance, I'm using Claude Code. Uh I was using Cursor, but I think Claude Code to me is is the best agentic AI tool at the moment. So I went back to just regular VS Code with the Claude Code extension. Now, I try not to to vibe code very much, meaning just let the AI run wild and and give it a few prompts here and there. Instead, I try to really structure my context and my rules and and do that through multiple files and work with the agent rather than just dictate what I want. And what I mean by that is I'll create multiple project context files that explain, you know, my coding style, the architecture I'm looking to use, uh, what I'm trying to build, and then I'll work collaboratively with Claude, and I'll write code manually, I'll test manually, and I'll also have the AI review it for things like redundancy and and potential bugs or or just better patterns that I might have missed, and so on. Now, for back-end deployment, I'll use render.com. And I absolutely love this service. They make deploying web services and APIs as easy as the front end. So, basically, you just import your your GitHub repo just like you would with with Versel or or Netlefi. And this beats setting up and and maintaining a Digital Ocean server big time. All right. So, now let's look at some of the projects that I've been working on. All right. So, I have two production projects that I want to announce that both use this exact stack. The first is webutills.io. So the idea behind this was to really just take all the little utilities that I use around the web such as PDF splitters and mergers, file compression, favicon generation, um generating fake data, all those little utilities that I would go to different websites for. I wanted to put that all into one platform. And the tools are extremely fast because 90% of them run client side. Uh, I added a bunch of dev tools like diffing, flexbox and grid generation, uh, git ignore gener uh, creation, typescript interface creation, and a bunch more. And everything is free. You can use it without registering, but you can register if you want to add any of the tools to your favorites for easy access. Um, it uses next off for authentication and you can use Google to log in or just email and password. Uh, I created an admin area to manage users and tools and see my analytics and stuff like that. Now, I did use AI pretty extensively, but like I said, lots of context engineering, manual code, um, tons of manual review and testing. So, that's webutils.io. Now, the next project that I have is devsheets.io. And this provides cheat sheets for common technologies. And I worked with Claude Code to shape these cheat sheets in a way where you really get the meat of the technology and what I would have wanted to to to learn and have on these sheets. And there's a quick reference and a detailed example for each concept or each thing that's talked about. So we have sheets for Git, TypeScript, Python, Express, DOM manipulation, even things like AI prompting. And I'll be adding many more to this. I plan on having, you know, hundreds of of cheat sheets and all different languages, too, not just JavaScript and Python. Uh, the next one is a SAS in the health niche, and it's far from done, but it it also runs on the stack. It's a symptom tracker to track health issues and symptoms with all kinds of analytics and giving you correlations and AI insights. I'm using the GPT40 mini model right now for as far as uh AI coming up with correlations and patterns as well as suggestions. And I just need to be careful because I can't be diagnosing people with diseases or anything like that. And there will be a premium tier with extra functionality. I don't expect this to be done for a few months now. I started out vibe coding this months ago and it didn't work out. I got all kinds of errors that were being suppressed and then when I would try to fix them, more things broke and it just ended up in just a mess. And it taught me a lesson. So, I'm glad it happened. It taught me that you can't just stay within the prompt and build a large application. It just it isn't going to work out. You need to get in there and manually run and write code and test. So, sometimes I may have a project that Nex.js doesn't fit. So for instance, I created a fake REST API tool similar to to JSON placeholder um which you can use for CRUD resources and and actually persist the data. So it's at apiocker.com and it's open source. You can contribute to it if you want. And for this I used Express and some other small libraries. And the the front end that you see here is is just simply an HTML page in the public folder. So it's just a Node.js Express project. Um, and the API is is basically what you're working with. And there's search, there's um delay simulation, there's all kinds of features. There's all kinds of resources you can access like to-dos and users and so on. And then I also created API probe.dev, which is another open- source tool similar to Postman where you can make HTTP requests and include headers, you can create different environments and so on. Um, both of these tools, like I said, are open source, so feel free to add some features and make a PR. All right, so that's what I'm using these days. Uh, again, if you're using something else, don't change that if it's working for you. But if you're struggling with your current stack and you want to give these these tools a try, um, you might find it useful. All right, guys. So, that's it. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.