Backlink Bento's Tech Stack

Dan Beall

— 1 min read

I’m genuinely excited to build my startup — Backlink Bento! Working in big tech, it was very frustrating at times. I felt the tech stack was highly complex. My new tech stack is refreshingly simple.

  • Python
  • Railway
  • Django
  • Postgres
  • uv
  • Bulma CSS framework

Overall, I’m really enjoying using uv. It’s a relatively new Python package and project manager that feels refreshing to work with. The best part is how effortlessly it handles virtual environments, removing the usual hassle. While learning commands like sync, add, and run was initially a bit tricky, integrating them into my Makefile streamlined the process. The pyproject.toml` format is also impressively simple and intuitive. It is overall superior to keeping multiple requirements-{your-env}.txt around.

Even though Django is showing its age it’s suprisingly powerful in 2024. The Django Admin interface is extremely powerful and it arguably saves hundreds of hours of valuable time. Because Django is using Python, that means you have access to an ecosystem of the best machine learning and data science packages. A hot take of mine is that overall, I think Django is slightly superior to Ruby on Rails because of this. I evaluated FastAPI and I think it’s pretty good. However, I think the ecosystem of Django is slightly better.

Last but not least, I want to touch on Bulma CSS. It is extremely simple, and I’ve managed to avoid using JavaScript so far. During my time at Twilio, I was a backend developer, so my experience with front-end development is limited. Bulma makes styling a front-end accessible even to backend developers.

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