I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot in the last few years. Here are a few of my favorite frameworks/tools (and a few boos). No renumeration was provided by anyone for this post.
The good:
Neon: My take – it’s like combining Postgres and Git. Create “branches” off other environments to easily reproduce data driven issues, without having to dump/reload the database manually. Reset to the parent branch to get the latest.
Langsmith: wrap your llm calls and get a very nice debugging environment with the ability to replay various prompts without having to execute the function in your app.
Cursor: better than VS Code + Copilot. I hate the term “vibe coding” but whatever you call it, I feel like it’s pretty good at it.
Duplocloud: I honestly don’t know much about their business model, but they’ve simplified devops and provided a nice “wrapper” UI around some of the terrible (cough cough… AWS looking at you) user experiences.
Quarkus: A nice alternative to Spring Boot. About as good at fast reloading as you’ll ever get with Java.
Fly.io: want to get something up and running in the cloud fast?
Terraform: Just enough structure to be dangerous.
And, to be fair, here are a few I don’t love:
Alembic. Could you make it any harder? I’ve used a lot of similar tools/frameworks and you’re my least favorite.
GraphQL: Maybe your time has come and gone. I appreciate the concept, but the execution is painful.
Python: See https://xkcd.com/1987/
Kubernetes: maybe makes sense for someone at some time, but a lot of complexity for what (if anything) it buys.
AWS: Hey, not everyone can afford a dedicated employee (or team!) to deal with your complexity, which is why there are whole companies that do that.
Javascript/Typescript libraries: it’s pretty interesting to me – growing up in the Java ecosystem, backwards compatibility was sacrosanct. In the Javascript/Typescript world… backwhat?
I’m sure there are more I could comment on. It’s been a fun few years.