Tech Stack

For this project, I chose JavaScript-related stack. About half a year ago, I started learning front-end to develop one of my pet projects built on .NET technologies. I found it hard to understand web development with .NET as a beginner who knew nothing about it at all. Nonetheless, I needed vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript anyway to build the website. After learning these technologies, I decided to continue learning JavaScript for the back-end, since I already knew something about it from doing the front-end. I found it much simpler to use the same language and not switch between them. JavaScript really has the lowest barrier to entry compared to C#. Also, there are many more vacancies related to it.

So my front-end is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For the back-end, I chose Node, as I mentioned that I wanted to proceed with JavaScript. I planned to build an MPA, because it's a better decision for this type of website where SEO is valuable. For this, I chose Express.

As the database, I chose PostgreSQL, because it's totally free and highly popular in the job market.

As my IDE, I used Visual Studio Code, and I don't think it really matters what IDE to choose, but VS Code provides a lot of extensions, and I'm used to working with it.

AI tools, such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, I used on free plans, switching between them once hitting a limit. I didn't use agentic AI coding tools (the ones you give full access to your codebase, and they can make changes on demand). Simple browser-based chats were enough to understand concepts and implement them on my own, even though that might be very slow.