My Developer Stack

TL;DR

  • Zed for my IDE
  • v0 for prototyping
  • Next.js + Tailwind for frontend
  • FastAPI (Python) or Axum (Rust) for backend
  • Postgres for database

Over the past year or two my preferred developer stack has changed a ton. Part of that is because of the advent of AI and all the new AI developer tools that are out there. But also moving from working at a large company to a startup has allowed me the freedom to experiment and use what I like more as opposed to what is required.

Developer Tools

My developer tools have changed a lot over the past year. I used to use VSCode with a bunch of plugins, but I've recently switched to using Zed as my daily driver. The main reason for switching was I felt like VSCode was getting too bloated and slow. I picked up Zed and could immediately everything felt snappier and more responsive. Running zed . to open a project is remarkably fast compared to VSCode. The two other big features I really like with Zed are:

  1. Vim mode that is actually useful
  2. AI integration works really smoothly

I love the vim mode with zed. There are some plugins that I have used with VSCode but they never felt quite right. Zed's vim mode works seamlessly.

The AI integration with VSCode is great. I love how the assistant panel is itself a text editor. It allows you to easily edit the context from previous questions or even delete a response and rephrase your question, and also since it's an editor you get copilot autocompletion suggestions for your AI questions, which is funny but also really useful.

Another dev tool I have recently added to my tool belt is v0. I can stumble my way through a frontend project, but definitely consider myself a backend developer first. V0 makes it so easy to prototype front end projects, and once I have a working prototype I can easily pull it down and make any minor changes I need. This works great for me cause I struggle more with the style aspect of frontend development than the actual logic.

Frontend

Next.js + Tailwind is my go to frontend stack. This is for two reasons:

  1. It's what I know best so I know I can get a project up and running quickly.
  2. It works really well with [v0.dev](https://v0.dev.

I do really like using Svelte + SvelteKit and will often use that if I'm the only one working on the project. But if I'm working with a team I'll almost always pick Next.js since the community and tooling around Next.js and React is so superb.

Backend

Python + FastAPI or Rust + Axum is my go to backend stack. I like FastAPI because it's really intuitive to write and it is incredibly easy to get something up and running. It plugs in with the rest of the python ecosystem and makes using things like SQLAlchemy really easy.

Depending on the project I will also occasionally use Rust + Axum. It is definitely more verbose than FastAPI, but just knowing that I'm writing something that is fast and most importantly comes with all the safety guarantees that rust provides is really nice.

Postgres is my default database. When developing locally I typically use docker with docker compose to spin up a Postgres instance that my locally running stack can talk to. This allows me to deploy my stack to a cloud provider without having to change any code at all. Just update some environment variables and I'm good to go.