My 2022 Programming Stack

As we slowly roll into 2022, I decided to take a step back and have an objective look at my coding stack for the near future. It's a short one - I'll keep it focused strictly on my programming languages of choice, ignoring other tools and services.

TL;DR - TALL stack (Laravel + Livewire + AlpineJS + TailwindCSS), Svelte, Electron.

Back-end

Laravel is my solution for anything requiring a database. Together with Livewire, AlpineJS, and TailwindCSS I can quickly build complex functionality and appealing UI.

With 8.1 PHP has never been better, and in recent years has risen from its slumber to make web development exciting again.

Built on top of PHP, Laravel is the best web framework that ever was (I'm biased, sue me) and continues to improve by leaps and bounds. Every time I ask myself what more is there to improve, along come a host of new features that make it even quicker to ship stuff.

Livewire is the logical companion to Laravel for building interactive UI without much JavaScript. It goes hand-in-hand with AlpineJS for those times when you need fancier UI behavior.

MySQL is the one and only server-side database I will be using in the near future, simply because I've been using it forever and I don't need anything more capable.

Front-end

I can't live without Tailwind since v0.7. As a full stack dev, it's a very reliable tool for building any kind of user-facing interface, quickly.

For static sites I will absolutely reach for Svelte and SvelteKit. I get a lot of joy building front-end heavy web apps with this fast, lightweight, minimalistic framework (sorry, compiler).

Philosophically, I've abandoned the concept of a backend-driven SPA (Single Page App). With Laravel and Livewire there's just no need for it. However, if I ever needed something along the lines, I would choose Laravel with Inertia.js and Svelte.

Desktop

Occasionally I build cross-platform desktop apps, such as SVGX. The easy choice is to use Electron in tandem with a preferred JS framework, and that would be Svelte in my case.

I am also exploring the possibility of integrating SQLite in a future Electron app.

Summary

I don't see my coding stack changing much over 2022. I've narrowed it down to an ecosystem centered around Laravel for back-end apps, with an offshoot around Svelte for front-end apps. Simple, fun, and super-productive.