A modern app tech stack, built for speed

Small teams can iterate more quickly using Rails with ViewComponent + Tailwind CSS + Hotwire. Build faster with no custom CSS and limited JS.

Jun 13, 2021 2 min read

A simpler stack, for 2021

The choice of technology stack has a big impact on your team’s ability to build a product quickly. This is especially true for small teams.

By choosing a stack with a strong principle of “convention over configuration”, like Ruby on Rails, you can eliminate unimportant choices. This lets you focus as much energy as possible on building what’s core to your business.

In the past, to have a snappy web app you needed to load a lot of Javascript up front, usually React, and then send JSON from the server. This split logic and coding proficiency in two, between the backend and the frontend.

Now, thanks to technologies like Hotwire’s Turbo Drive (previously Turbolinks) plus Turbo Frames and Turbo Stream you can write your business logic once and send HTML from the server. This makes development simpler and more productive since almost no Javascript is needed.

Similarly to Javascript, CSS in the past decade has required too much expertise and writing of custom code.

Now, thanks to Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework, you can “rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML”.

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Modern app tech stack

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