Technology Radar

An opinionated guide to technologies, tools, and practices.

Every item reflects direct production experience. We don't place technologies we haven't used.

Build

TypeScriptThe default for any serious JavaScript project.

ReactStill the best trade-off of ecosystem, hiring, and capability.

Tailwind CSSReplaced component libraries as the pragmatic choice for rapid UI.

ViteBuild tooling that just works. Webpack is over.

PostgreSQLThe database. Reliable, extensible, battle-tested.

RedisIn-memory data store that does exactly what it claims.

WebSocketsReal-time data in finance, dashboards, and collaboration. Proven.

ElysiaBun-native backend framework. Fast, typed, minimal.

BullMQRedis-backed job queues. Reliable async processing.

TypeORMTypeScript ORM with migrations. Gets the job done.

Material UIComprehensive React component library for rapid enterprise UI.

SwiftApple's language. Fast, safe, and the only real choice for iOS.

SwiftUIDeclarative UI for Apple platforms. The future of iOS development.

AG GridEnterprise data grid. Handles millions of rows without breaking.

HighchartsBest charting library available. Worth the licence.

Actix-webRust web framework. Fastest in class, production-proven.

RustPerformance and safety that justify the learning curve.

BunGenuinely faster than Node. The ecosystem caught up.

SeaORMAsync Rust ORM. Type-safe database access without the raw SQL.

VikeVite-native React framework. The lightweight alternative to Next.js.

Preact3KB React alternative. Worth evaluating where bundle size matters.

Next.jsGrowing complexity and Vercel coupling. Watching the direction.

DenoGood ideas, but Bun won the mindshare race.

JavaVerbose, slow to start, heavy to run. Still everywhere.

C#Good language, overcomplicated community, one config away from null chaos.

SpringJava enterprise standard. Solid engineering, heavy ecosystem.

ASP.NET CoreCapable framework, Microsoft ecosystem lock-in.

PHPLegacy codebases work. New projects belong in TypeScript.

MariaDBFine MySQL fork. PostgreSQL is the better default.

SymfonyBest PHP framework. Still PHP.

DoctrineSerious PHP ORM. Migrations, DBAL, the works.

TwigModern PHP templating. Clean syntax, secure defaults.

EasyAdminSymfony admin panels in minutes. Held back by PHP.

PHPStanStatic analysis that makes PHP tolerable. Essential for PHP codebases.

PuppeteerHeadless Chrome automation. Playwright does it better.

PrestaShopPHP e-commerce platform. Works for what it is, limited by PHP.

Express.jsThe default Node.js framework for a decade. Elysia is the future.

InversifyJSDependency injection for TypeScript. Useful, but adds ceremony.

Passport.jsAuthentication middleware. Works, but Auth0 is less to maintain.

AngularToo much ceremony for too little payoff.

jQuery UIDatepickers and dialogs from 2010. Material UI replaced the need.

jQueryStill maintained, still works. Not for new projects.

MongoDBPostgreSQL JSONB covers the use cases. Move on.

SmartyTwig replaced it in PHP. React replaced PHP templating entirely.

FlourishAbandoned PHP library. Migrate when you touch the code.

WebpackVite killed it. The configuration era is over.

BabelTypeScript and native browser support made it redundant.

GraphQLHad promise. Too bloated for its own good while lacking important functionality.

Apollo FederationGraphQL gateway complexity. Solving a problem that shouldn't exist.

Apollo GraphQLGraphQL server with the most overhead. Drop GraphQL, drop Apollo.

ExtJS / SenchaCommercial lock-in for what React and MUI give you for free.

BootstrapTailwind gives you the system without the opinions. Move on.

AngularJSEnd of life since 2021. Every day without migrating costs more.

Run

AWS CDKInfrastructure as Code in TypeScript. Replaces CloudFormation YAML entirely.

DockerStandard for reproducible environments everywhere.

Amazon S3Foundation of half of AWS. Storage solved.

Amazon CloudFrontEdge delivery for static sites. Simple, effective, cheap.

Amazon ECS / FargateContainers without the Kubernetes overhead. Production-proven for four years.

Amazon RDSManaged PostgreSQL and MySQL. Handles scaling, backups, and failover.

Amazon Route 53DNS that just works with the rest of AWS.

NginxReverse proxy and web server. Fast, stable, everywhere.

StripePayment processing done right. Best API in the industry.

JWTStateless authentication tokens. Simple, portable, standard.

Auth0Authentication and authorisation without building it yourself.

Amazon EC2Still has its place, but Fargate removes the need most of the time.

AWS LambdaRight for event-driven workloads. Not a universal architecture.

Amazon SESTransactional email. Good enough, cheap.

Amazon CloudWatchAWS-native monitoring. Functional, not elegant.

Amazon ElastiCacheManaged Redis. Makes sense if you are all-in on AWS.

Amazon SQS / SNSAsync messaging done simply.

KubernetesUseful if you sell cloud-agnostic software. Otherwise, use your cloud natively.

Electron / OpenFinDesktop wrappers for web apps. The browser is the platform now.

Automate

Claude APIBest reasoning model available. Production integration experience.

Claude CodeThe AI coding tool that doesn't fight its own context window.

Claude SkillsReusable prompts that turn Claude Code into a specialist.

Model Context ProtocolUniversal standard for AI-to-data integration. Use it daily.

QdrantVector database that delivers. Fast, purpose-built, production-ready.

OllamaRun LLMs locally. Essential for RAG and embedding pipelines.

LM StudioLocal model server with an OpenAI-compatible API. Drop-in replacement.

DoclingDocument parsing that actually works. PDF, DOCX, images — all handled.

nomic-embed-textLocal embedding model. Fast, free, good enough for production RAG.

EmbeddingGemmaGoogle's embedding model. Strong retrieval quality from a small footprint.

GemmaGoogle's open-weight model. Best local reasoning at its size.

Piper TTSFast local text-to-speech. Low latency, many voices.

Kokoro TTSHigh-quality local TTS. Best naturalness in the open-source space.

Diana TTSRust-based TTS engine. Fast inference, small footprint.

GitHub CopilotGood autocomplete. Not agentic.

GeminiInteresting multimodal capabilities. Unclear production story.

GPT / OpenAI APICapable but expensive. The burn rate gives pause.

LlamaDevelopment has stalled. DeepSeek and Qwen are more interesting.

ElasticsearchVector databases are eating its lunch.

Deliver

JiraIssue tracking standard. Bloated, but nothing replaces it.

GitVersion control. Solved problem. No alternatives worth considering.

Visual Studio CodeThe editor that won. Extensions, speed, universal support.

SentryError tracking that shows you what actually happened.

Spec Driven DevelopmentWrite the spec before the code. AI implements, humans verify.

OpenSpecCLI tool that makes Spec Driven Development practical.

TDDWrite tests first. Everything else follows.

PlaywrightCross-browser end-to-end testing that actually works.

StorybookComponent development in isolation. Essential for shared UI libraries.

VitestVite-powered testing. Fast, compatible, no config.

JenkinsNot glamorous. Reliable. Extensible.

Oxlint50-100x faster than ESLint. Already replaced it.

PrettierFormatting is a solved problem. Just use it.

GitHub ActionsGood for simpler pipelines. Jenkins wins for complex orchestration.

SonarQubeCode quality metrics. Useful for teams.

KanbanLightweight. Fits how small teams actually work.

CypressPlaywright does everything it does, better.

ESLintOxlint is 50-100x faster. No reason to stay.

JestVitest replaced it. Faster, simpler, Vite-native.

BiomeTried to replace ESLint and Prettier in one tool. Oxlint + Prettier is better.

WebDriverIOAnother Selenium wrapper. Playwright made the entire WebDriver ecosystem redundant.

SerenityBDD layer over Selenium. Both the foundation and the abstraction are obsolete.

SeleniumPlaywright replaced it entirely. No reason to start new projects with Selenium.

ScrumCeremony that optimises for managers, not engineers.