Programming

In my opinion, you should try a bunch of programming language and frameworks so you can judge yourself which one you really like. Building a bunch of small side projects to get a feel of those languages and frameworks is better than building one big project at this learning stage. After you have settled with one or two programming languages and frameworks you like, then you can proceed with complex side projects to gain deeper experience with the language and framework of your choosing.

My preferred stack to give you some inspiration:

• Backend: Django with Django Rest Framework. Reason: there are faster python backend framework out there, but nothing beat django yet when you need to build something quick.
• Frontend: Next.js is getting really good these days.
• Database: Postgres. Very easy to setup and left alone. Even without tuning, it works just fine.
• Task Queue: Learning how to use a task queue is essential. I use Celery with Redis backend for small projects or RabbitMQ backend for larger projects.
• Docker: learn how package your project into a docker image you can deploy in various cloud services
• Infra: I deploy my side projects to a bare metal server running RKE2. Having those projects as docker images with kubernetes config makes it really easy to migrate them to a new servers or cloud providers.

The framework, frankly, doesn't matter. Use what you can find good help documents for and examples. Statistically, that'll be Python or JavaScript. But use what works for you.

The big challenge you're going to run into is that I'm not going to create yet another login account to use your site, and no one else is either. To solve that, you'll need activity pub.

So while you're picking tools, frameworks and libraries, use whatever is working for you, but do a quick check that it supports or can be made to support ActivityPub.

Edit: This post brought to your server by - you guessed it - ActivityPub. ActivityPub: Like it or love it, you're hearing about it through ActivityPub.

There are two schools:

1. the best stack is the one you know best
2. the best stack is the one designed for the job

Remember that Google was written in Python and Java. Facebook in PHP. iOS in Objective-C. GitHub in Ruby on Rails.

Get started, make mistakes so you can learn. The best stack is the one you use to build things with. If you want to learn a new tool, use it. Otherwise, use what you're familiar with.

No language / framework is going to give you a massive advantage here.

Either stick to what you know best or try out some different ones and see what you like.

My personal favourite is aspnetcore and c#. It provides pretty much everything you need out of the box and has a very large ecosystem for connecting with external services.

I recommend Ruby on Rails. I am biased with 17 years of professional experience, but it has batteries included, end to end everything you need to build, test and deploy a modern web application. In my opinion Ruby is the most pleasant language to read and write. But try to compare many stacks and see what you like best.

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