For about eight months or so, I decided to commit myself and focus on Node.js as my main backend techstack of choice. PHP/Laravel have treated me well and I’ve been loving Go, but I wanted to focus on one tech stack, which is now Node as my main go-to. There’s just something about Javascript that I can’t get away from. Maybe it’s the new features coming out, it’s functional programming nature and it’s flexibility. Who knows.
Reflection
I’ve been pretty happy with my choice to stick to Node as my primary stack. I mainly try to stick to Postgres as my database, express as my web framework of choice, etc. I tend to take the Go philosophy with me when I start a new project. I start very basic and small depending on my needs, then I work my way up as I go along. I find Node/Express to be very nice for this.
Some Thoughts on TypeScript
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. You can think of it as “JavaScript with types.” I’ve been using for a current project that I’m working on and it has been a joy to work with. You can transfer your existing Node application from JS to TypeScript by just changing to file extension from “.js” to “.ts.” (Check out migrating from JavaScript) You can refactor as you need to and organize your application’s architecture as it grows.
For the database end-of-things, I’ve been using an ORM called Typeorm. It seems to be quite new, however, a really solid ORM. It’s very similar to Django’s ORM, SQLAlchemy and Laravel’s Eloquent. In fact, it does support both the Active Record pattern and the Data Mapper pattern. Really neat since I haven’t found an ORM I’ve liked when developing in Node.
And Then There’s Python and Django
I really love Python! I really do! It was my first language that I’ve fully dove into and understood. The dev shop I currently work at primarily specializes in Django development and I’ve used it quite a bit over here. I love it (Did I mention that?)! As far as Django, I love using it for rapid prototyping and the Django Rest Framework is really solid. Since I’m a REST API development junky, it’s one of my favorite tools. I do want to make reusable Python/Django open source packages in the near future, just depends on needs and use-cases around a particular problem. I think I’ll keep coming back to Python as one of my main languages, and that’s just fine. :)
Closing Thoughts
It’s kind of hard to decide which tech stack I want to choose as my main. Maybe it’s better to master both? Perhaps focus on mastering backend development instead of a particular stack? Perhaps switching between Node and Python is a good thing while playing around with Go on the side! Though which technologies I invest my time in has been on my mind a lot lately. What are your thoughts?