About 6 months ago, I wrote about The Perfect Stack. It's my unoriginal, facetious take on a stack for web apps. The TL;DR is to use Bun, Hono (with TSX), HTMX, and SQLite.
Back when I wrote about it, it was mostly theoretical. But, since then, I have built a few projects with it.
- A Micropub server so I can post from iA Writer (including image uploads)
- A url shortener/QR code generator to facilitate our home database
- A budget app for my wife and I to quickly see how much is available to spend.
Each of these projects is perfect. Perfect for me. Building an app to 100% is hard. But guess what. When I build something for just me and my wife to use, it needs to be like 10% complete. And the 10% of the features I build are exactly what we need. And they were a joy to build and iterate on.
The stack, IMO, is perfect. Why is it perfect? It doesn't make me think. I have already made a lot of decisions ahead of time. I just have to run bun create and I'm ready to roll. It's a lot like iOS development in that way. There's a lot of value in exploring new technologies. But there is also a lot of value in having something you're comfortable with. Even if it's not the most popular or the fastest.