In search of a calm tech stack

I had an idea for a new side project I'd like to build the other day, but couldn't think of an obvious tool to use to build it. More generally, I've been struggling lately to come up with a way of building more interactive web things in a way that fits in my brain and meets the needs of some of my project ideas.

Come along with a brain-dump of my slightly chaotic thought processes as I work out whether there's any kind of tech stack I can work with, in a way that I can understand and maintain without stress.

My project doesn't need to do a lot, but there's a few things I'd really like to achieve:

• a web-based frontend, with quite a bit of user interactivity without full page reloads (SPA-like, but not necessarily actually a SPA)
• a database
• can be hosted for free (for at least maybe 10 users) on a PaaS or my own home server
• eventually some ability to use from the web on Android, including add-to-homescreen (or a full PWA) and sending push notifications.

I have a lot more thoughts on what I'd like the tech stack to be like though! I had a good think about what I'd really like in a tech stack (for this project but also in general), and came up with the following.

• not constantly introducing breaking changes. Some hope of the thing being able to run for 6 months unattended and still work, and be able to be worked on again without a complete rewrite.
• good, thorough, clear documentation, at least at the level of the framework/library's API or main features.
• some level of existing ecosystem, including community examples of how to do common things, some tutorials/video walkthroughs available - I learn best by example
• either some level of "batteries included", or a strong set of guidelines/best practices around how to do things like database migrations, testing, code organisation.
• something to help me handle user authentication (I really don't enjoy spending weeks building this from scratch!), which isn't just "pay this external service". A blessed package or approach, or something built-in would be fine.

Maybe I'm being unreasonably demanding of my tech stack, but finding something to meet at least most of these things is worth a try, right? Let's start with things I've used recently.

• Sveltekit, which is an immediate nope on the grounds of the whole mental model changing between Svelte 4 and 5, and currently very incomplete documentation.
• Astro could maybe just about cut it since the introduction of Astro DB, but community resources for doing "full-stack" Astro are still pretty light.
• Django actually meets most of my requirements for what I'd like the tech to be, but I have no idea how to make a Django app have a reactive SPA-like frontend, at least not without resorting to Svelte or React, which aren't options because I'd like an absence of frequent breaking API changes.

Nothing in there really fits. How about some other things I've at least played with?

• Redwood would have been a possibility, but I just don't have brain space to engage with understanding React Server Components.
• Clojure/ClojureScript could maybe work. I've been out of the ecosystem a long time, so would have to do a lot of research into what's changed, and I've always struggled to find community example code at a level I find accessible. Biff particularly looked interesting, but I immediately bounced off the docs which assume a whole lot more Clojure knowledge than I have right now.

So something completely new? I listen to a lot of tech podcasts, so have the names of a lot of possible options lurking in my brain. Some serious considerations

• My partner suggested Pavex, a new Rust-based thing which looks really interesting, but I think is a bit new and scary just yet. Specifically, it is missing community examples, which is the thing I find most helpful when learning something mostly new. I can hack on a little bit of Rust, but I'm far from a confident Rust developer
• Laravel? An interesting thought, with a rich and seemingly quite happy ecosystem. But I can't quite get over the trauma of some truly terrible PHP code in a previous job, and I worry that I'd struggle to learn what "good" PHP actually looks like.
• Rails? Again, quite appealing but I don't really want to get involved with anything associated with DHH. I don't have brain space for the drama and hot takes, even if it doesn't directly affect rails.

Rails, that reminds me of one final possible option - Phoenix . Sure, I've never written Elixir, or indeed anything that runs on BEAM (Erlang's virtual machine), but I'd also never written Clojure when I started my first real dev job at a Clojure shop. Slightly weird-looking syntax doesn't really bother me, and functional programming usually fits my brain better than alternatives.

As a complete outsider with no prior knowledge or experience, I went to the main site, docs site and GitHub repo to get an idea of what I was looking at. Phoenix seems pretty stable, with the last (minor) release like a year ago, and a bunch of patches since then. As far as I can tell, no breaking changes since then, and a really thorough migration guide from the previous minor release. The features list on the homepage matches pretty closely with both what I'd like from my app, and what I need from a tech stack.

I had a quick search around for community resources, and found plenty that seemed accessible enough to me. Then this article ran across my RSS feeds, and I was sold on the idea of productivity without having to worry about making early mistakes in code organisation.

So I guess I'm learning Phoenix (and the associated Liveview for super-reactive frontends) and Elixir now? If nothing else, it will be a different kind of challenge than keeping on top of my node modules. And I guess if you're following along with me for #WeblogPoMo2024, this won't be the last you'll hear of this unexpected adventure.

Today's soundtrack is August by Trio Dhoore, which is beautifully calm.