Engineering & Stack Guides
Popular stacks for solo builders.
Short guides to popular frameworks and services: what each one is good at and where it fits. Launches on Hauntboard aren't grouped by stack yet.
Next.js
React framework with server rendering, routing, and backend endpoints built in.
Next.js is a React framework maintained by Vercel. Its App Router supports server components, static and dynamic rendering, and server-side endpoints, so one project can hold both a marketing site and an app.
Convex
Backend platform where the database, queries, and mutations are all TypeScript.
With Convex you write queries, mutations, and actions as TypeScript functions that run on Convex's servers. Queries are reactive: when the data they read changes, subscribed clients receive the new result automatically.
Supabase
Postgres platform with auth, storage, and APIs generated from your schema.
Every Supabase project is a full Postgres database. Around it, Supabase adds authentication, file storage, edge functions, and APIs generated from your schema, so you can work in SQL and still get a hosted backend.
Tailwind CSS
Utility-first CSS framework.
Tailwind CSS gives you small utility classes for spacing, colour, typography, and layout that you compose in your markup. A build step scans your files and generates CSS only for the classes you use.
Stripe
Payments API with hosted checkout, subscriptions, and billing.
Stripe handles cards and local payment methods, subscriptions, invoices, and payouts. Stripe Checkout and the Customer Portal are hosted pages, so you can take payments and let customers manage subscriptions without building those screens yourself.
shadcn/ui
A component collection you copy into your codebase.
shadcn/ui isn't installed as a dependency. Its CLI adds each component's source to your project, built on accessible headless primitives and styled with Tailwind CSS, and from then on the code is yours to change.
TypeScript
JavaScript with static types, checked before your code runs.
TypeScript adds a type system to JavaScript. The compiler catches many mistakes, such as wrong argument types or possibly-undefined values, before the code runs, and editors use the types for autocompletion and safe renames.
Python
General-purpose language behind most AI and data tooling.
Python is the main language for machine learning, data analysis, and scripting. Indie developers often use it for AI services, scrapers, and background workers alongside a JavaScript frontend.
Cloudflare Workers & Pages
Serverless functions, site hosting, and storage on Cloudflare's network.
Cloudflare Workers run your code across Cloudflare's global network, and Pages hosts static and full-stack sites. Storage options include KV, the D1 SQL database, and R2 object storage, which doesn't charge egress fees.
Astro
Web framework for content sites that ships no JavaScript by default.
Astro renders pages to HTML and only loads JavaScript for the interactive components you mark, an approach it calls islands architecture. That suits blogs, docs, and marketing sites.
Resend & React Email
Email-sending API plus a React library for building email templates.
React Email is an open-source library for writing email templates as React components; Resend is an email-sending API from the same team. Together they replace hand-written, table-based email HTML.
FastAPI
Python API framework built on type hints.
FastAPI uses Python type hints to validate requests with Pydantic and to generate OpenAPI documentation automatically. It supports async endpoints, which suits APIs that spend most of their time waiting on other services, such as LLM calls.
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