Stacktacular

This week's blog prompt:

"You just completed your Umbrella Project demos, and introduced your tech stack to the team! In your blog this week, take some time to discuss the technology you’re using and why you chose it. What problems does this stack solve for you, and what challenges do you see it posing? Were you stuck between a few choices, or was this an obvious decision for your team?"

Kayla and I have chosen the stack detailed below.

She made this super awesome visual, which was a great way to present our tech stack at this past Friday's project demos. In determining what to use for our tech stack, we drew from a variety of sources. First, we discussed what technologies we had used in the past, and found that we have a lot of common ground with Node.js and React. Next, we checked out the Stack Overflow developer survey to see what technologies are popular amongst professional developers and to ensure that we're choosing things that are marketable, employable, and have a lot of documentation associated with them. Third, we explored some of the documentation for things that we were thinking of using in order to compare them with other similar technologies.

A nice feature of this tech stack is that we are not having to learn an entirely new language (i.e. Java for the backend), especially as we will both likely need to learn a new (yet unknown) language for our employer host projects. Working with this tech stack ensures that we get continued practice with technology that we're already familiar with as we continue to learn and grow in new technologies. By that same token, we are also not using this as an independent project to solidify the learning of a new language (i.e. if we were both learning Java or Ruby for our employer host projects). As of now, though, we still aren't sure what tech stack we will be working with with our employer host, so getting that practice in was less of a concern at the time of our umbrella project planning.

Overall, I'm excited! It's been a while since I've really dug into some code, and it's been great to start getting back into the swing of things.