How do you know what stack is right for you?

If it's a fully descending one.

Depends on the project. My goto is either the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) or the MARC (MongoDB, Asp.Net Core, React, C#). Admittedly, MARC is far less popular

@10Dev @10Dev Thanks! Do you think MERN projects are a good way to start as a junior?

@DevMike absolutely. There's a lot of tutorials out there, and the stack is relativity easy to work with

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I've used the MEAN (all ts) stack in the past. For anything new, I'm using PR?R.

MEAN = MongoDB Express Angular Node

PR?R = Postgres Rocket <whatever fits the project> Rust.

And as for how you know what to choose? Try a few different frontends and backends and go with what you like. Most of the major frontend frameworks are quite similar.

You can alway go plain js as well, that's the prefferd way for small/simple sites.

@olback Neat, another Rocket user!

Currently using mostly Rust/Rocket + either Postgres, (persisted) Redis, or both — usually with rather plain JSON or GraphQL endpoints, as I mostly develop for other developers.

For a beginner I would actually recommend Go. I started hating it for my own projects, because in the long run you start to miss more advanced general programming features. That doesn't mean it's not an excellent place to get started with backend development.

The advantage is that it's a simple language, you don't need a framework, testing library, transpiler, build chain or webserver for backend — and from Go it's actually rather easy to learn other languages like Python & JS.

Also remember that you don't always need a "stack" — there's plenty of cases where you can design a beautiful website with something tiny like PureCSS for style, and no JavaScript at all.

For persistence of data you have to ask yourself: Do I really need a full featured SQL database server? Sometimes, a single sqlite file is sufficient.

No need to pick an entire stack right away.
If you like javascript: go with node. If you use node Express is bascially default server framework.

you don’t necessarily need to decide on a DB and a frontend framework right away.
Maybe you don’t even need it. Start off with vanilla js and a few content API:s

Thanks for all the feedback! It means a lot and helps ☺️

For anything that I need up and running fast, like, a hackathon or an assignment or some POC, I'd go with Python or Node.

For production systems, I "have to" go with Java.