Not a stack list — the reasoning behind choosing one technology over another, including when each one is the wrong choice.
Mature — in production use since 2016, with the App Router (Server Components, streaming) stable since 2023.
A React framework for production — server rendering, routing, and data fetching in one toolchain.
Established — public since 2021, acquired by Shopify in 2022 and now the foundation of Shopify's Hydrogen commerce framework.
A React framework built around web standards — nested routing and data loading tied directly to HTTP.
Mature — in continuous development since 1996, with a large ecosystem of managed hosting and extensions.
An open-source relational database known for correctness, extensibility, and a long track record in production.
Mature — widely used in production since the early 2010s, with a large managed-hosting ecosystem (MongoDB Atlas).
A document database built for flexible, evolving schemas at the cost of relational guarantees.
Established — in production use since 2020, positioned as an open-source alternative to Firebase built on Postgres.
A managed Postgres platform bundling authentication, storage, and realtime — a backend without building one from scratch.
Mature — a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project, the de facto standard for container orchestration since the late 2010s.
A container orchestration platform for running, scaling, and healing distributed applications automatically.
Mature — widely adopted as the standard infrastructure-as-code tool since the mid-2010s, with broad provider support.
Infrastructure as code — cloud resources defined declaratively and provisioned consistently across environments.
Mature — Shopify Plus has served large commerce merchants since 2014, handling significant peak-traffic events reliably.
Shopify's enterprise commerce platform — managed infrastructure and checkout for high-growth commerce businesses.
Established — GPT-series models have been available via API since 2020, with rapid iteration and broad production adoption since.
A model provider offering general-purpose large language models via API, without operating infrastructure yourself.
Established — widely adopted since 2022 as one of the standard orchestration layers for LLM-based applications, though the ecosystem still evolves quickly.
An orchestration framework for chaining prompts, retrieval, and tools into a coherent AI application.
Mature — in production since 2015, powering apps at significant scale (including Meta's own apps) with a large ecosystem.
A framework for building native iOS and Android apps using React, sharing code and concepts with web.