Starting a new software project can be a daunting task with lots of meticulous planning and coordination. One of the most important aspects is making the right technical decisions to set your team and the project up for success.

Defining the Project

One of the most common mistakes made at the beginning of a project is choosing technologies and even beginning to build without having a good idea of the expectations. Coordinate with stakeholders appropriately to ensure your team has a clear understanding of the problems needing to be solved.

While in many cases project specifics such as minor features may not have a direct impact on technology choices, when they do it can be extremely important to make the right decisions to avoid setbacks.

Team Capabilities

Many software developers are capable of working with a wide array of technologies, but everyone has specialties and preferences. It’s important to consider any existing team’s skillsets to ensure rapid iteration within the chosen tech stack.

If you’re hiring, try to focus on modern but established technologies and look for developers with complimenting skillsets. If you’re not a technical contributor yourself, make sure you have a trusted team member or consultant to help make reasonable choices here.

It’s common to get excited about shiny new frameworks and technologies, but be wary of anything without a track record of reliability and support.

Front End

For very simple apps or those with special performance requirements, you may be able to get away without full frameworks and just use vanilla JavaScript with some helpful libraries.

For others, it’s often best to choose a widely used framework based on the developer skills available to you, such as:

• React
• Angular
• Vue.js

Which framework you choose here is not wildly important in terms of functionality, but it’s important to choose something your developers are familiar and able to build with.

Back End

Similar to the front end, you may be able to get away with not using a full web framework, but in this case it’s often a better idea to use an established solution for the sake of performance and security.

Some of the common back-end web frameworks used today are:

• Next.js (JavaScript - React front end)
• Express (JavaScript)
• Laravel (PHP)
• Ruby on Rails (Ruby)

Remember to choose a framework and language that won’t require too much time for your developers to get up to speed with.

Conclusion

Choosing the tech stack for a new project is an important part of the planning process. Remember to:

• Consider every facet of the project
• Cater to your developers’ skills
• Focus on modern, reliable, and proven technologies