What is YOUR TECH STACK?

If you’re in the tech sector, you’ve probably heard the phrase ‘tech stack’ before. Like many pieces of jargon in our field, it’s not clear what that phrase means. Understanding your technology stack, however, is important for the success of your product, whether it’s an app or an entire ecosystem.

Let’s take a look at tech stacks and talk about why understanding your web app technology stack is so important.

What is a tech stack?

A technology stack is a crucial part of developing any web or mobile application. People refer to the term when speaking of the combination of programming languages and software underneath a development project in question.

A tech stack is the underlying element of a web or mobile application. These are the frameworks, languages, and software products that everything else is built on. For example, you might have created your web application with ruby on rails—that’s the language and framework. That might access a database created with PostgreSQL. You’ll need to host that on a server, say, an Apache server. You’ll need Phusion Passenger to make that happen. Those are all elements of the server-side stack.

The client-side tech stack includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s what translates your application to a readable format for the user’s browser. If you’ve created a mobile application, the stack is very small: it’s usually only a native application, created with something like XCode or Android Studio.

Why your technology stack is important?

Your Tech stack used in a web application development can have a big effect on how your app works and how it will behave in the future.

For example, some server systems are made for high-read operations but are less efficient when it comes to high-write traffic. That’s an important thing to know if you’re transitioning your app from local file storage to cloud file storage.

Your tech stack can also influence the scalability of your product. Certain stacks will better serve different projects. Because so many different combinations are possible for your tech stack, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to generalize. But getting familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your tech stack before you start building your product will help you take advantage of the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.

How to choose the right tech stack?

Unless you’re an experienced developer, you probably have no idea how to choose a tech stack. And that’s okay. As an ideal person, you’re not likely to have to dig into the code on the server or client sides. But if you’re driving the creation of the product, you need to make sure the right decisions get made.

The best advice I can give is simple: work with someone who has experience in your area. Server- and client-side developers who have built similar apps can provide invaluable expertise on which elements you should include in your stack.

Does your organization have a tech stack in place? If so, what elements is it composed of? I would love to know. Leave a comment.