Every technology decision is a trade-off. There is no stack that is perfect for every situation, and any team that tells you otherwise is either selling something or has not built enough different things. At MildFist, we have strong preferences — but they come from experience, not ideology.
Our Default Stack
For most web projects, we reach for Next.js. It gives us a productive full-stack development environment, excellent performance characteristics out of the box, and a component model that scales well as applications grow. Paired with TypeScript, it catches a wide class of bugs before they ever reach production.
For styling, we use Tailwind CSS. The utility-first approach keeps styling co-located with markup, eliminates the cognitive overhead of naming things, and makes it easy to maintain visual consistency across a large codebase.
Why TypeScript, Always
We write TypeScript on every project, without exception. The upfront cost of typing your interfaces and function signatures is small. The downstream benefit — better refactoring, better tooling, fewer runtime surprises — is substantial. More importantly, TypeScript makes a codebase more readable for the next person who picks it up, including future-you six months from now.
Choosing the Right Database
Here, we are more flexible. For most projects that need a relational model, PostgreSQL is our default. It is reliable, well-understood, and supported by an excellent ecosystem of tools and managed services. For projects with different access patterns — high-frequency writes, document-style data — we evaluate alternatives on a case-by-case basis.
On New Frameworks and Tools
We pay attention to what is emerging in the ecosystem, but we are deliberate about adoption. A new tool needs to prove itself before we bet a client's product on it. We keep a small set of experimental projects running precisely so that we can evaluate new approaches without putting production systems at risk.
The goal is always the same: ship reliable software that is easy to maintain and extend. The specific tools are a means to that end.