My Techstack in 2026

2025 was Quite a Year

In 2025, I have had my most productive year, shipping 2 mobile apps, a personal website, and a ton of tools for my company, RadiusAI. During this time, I have gained a lot of experience with a ton of technologies and services, and this is my tech list for 2026.

NextJS versus React

I love both NextJS and React but they serve different use cases.
NextJS is a fullstack platform and ideal for Software as a Service (SaaS) where SEO and time to first byte is crutial. React is really more for internal Dashboards or interal company toolings.

In 2025, I shipped a SaaS dashboard that was using a traditional NextJS application with the built in TypeScript /api routes. Later in the year, there were some tasks I needed that was better suited for python, so i migrated some of the API routes to use FastAPI in Python. It all seemed to work quite well.

In 2026, if I was to build a SaaS, I would use NextJS deployed to Vercel and just make sure rate limiting is enabled as well as billing limits applied.

If I was building an interal dashboard, which I quite often end of doing (BTB), I would use React with a Fast API python backend.

AstroJS

By far my favorite way to ship a fast statically generated site is AstroJS deployed to Cloudflare Pages. I used to use GatsbyJS, but the tooling behind AstroJS is by far superior. I typically try to ship as little JavaScript to the browser when using Astro, but there was a few React elements I needed to display on my site. Using Astro’s Island Architecture, I was able to easily load react only when visible to acomplish this.

Checkout Astro if you haven’t already.

Databases

The 2 main database services I would use in 2026 would be NeonDB or PlanetScale. Neon’s main advantage is that it scales to near $0 cost when not in use. The disadvantages are that currently it is in a single geographic region, and suffers from a minor cold start startup if not warmed up.

PlanetScale doesn’t suffer from cold starts, but you are paying for its up time 100%. PlanetScale also allows for more database instances in different geographic regions if that is important to you.

One other option is that if you are using Railway, Railway has a Postgres service as well.

Whatever you chose, just make sure where ever your API is hosted, that it is as close to your database as possible.

ORMs

If you use an Object Relational Mapper (ORM), you have a few options in 2026.
Prisma is a great choice for TypeScript applications with incredible documentation and developer adoption.

The last time I used it, I noticed it was quite chatty with the database and was sending many more queries to the database than I expected. I am not sure if this was addressed, but I have been using Drizzle lately.

If you are using Python as an API, check out SqlAlchemy.

Mobile App Development

For mobile development, I am deeply invested in the React ecosystem, so I typically stick with React Native with Expo. I have dabbled with Swift for Apple Native development while building a license plate detector app, but I was able to do everything I needed in React Native.

I haven’t learned Dart so I have never tried Flutter and I haven’t programmed in Kotlin, so I have stayed away from Android mobile app development.

Where To Deploy

In 2025, most of my deployed API backends were deployed to AWS or Azure kubernetes clusters. But near the end of 2025 and into this year, I have decided that I can get much better performance at a lower cost by switching to Railway or Fly.io (even Hetzner for 1 project), and just scale horizontally.

My React applications are always deployed to Cloudflare Pages and my NextJS applications deployed to Vercel.

Backend as a Service

I am trying to get away from managing services. Some of my apps is a collection of microservices that I have to manage and I want to get away from devops and focus on deploying features.

In 2025 I have been using Supabase quite a lot. But in 2026, I have decided to switch to Convex and so far I have been loving the move. Having TypeScript from front to back has really reduced my bugs in production and tests are easier to write. I highly recommend checking out Convex.

Development Environment

I am a traditionalist so all my Python and Web Development is done with Visual Studio Code on a Mac.

I love JetBrains tools! For C++, I use CLion on my Mac and for connecting to traditional database, I use DataGrip. Both CLion and DataGrip are free for non-commercial use.

Finally I use Claude Code to assist with coding.