Technologies You Should Consider in Your 2023 Tech Stack

As promised in my previous article, Tech Wrap-up 2022: A CTO’s Perspective, here’s a list of some technologies which you should consider including in your 2023 tech-stack. Let’s have a look and understand why I feel so strongly about them.

Vercel

Vercel has been consolidating React developers into their corner with their popular NextJS and no-nonsense hosting platform. They have been racking up hundreds of millions in funding and as of late 2021 were valued at over $1 billion.

While NextJS pushed them into the spotlight, they certainly haven't slowed down. That is why we believe they fit more into the Hype List than a champion. They are breaking down more boundaries and their acquisition of Monorepo Turborepo was brilliant. Open sourcer Jared Palmer came with the deal and is pushing both Turborepo and their newly announced Turbopack forward. Turbopack is billed as the successor to Webpack, and with good reason, the creator of Webpack is on the team. Turbopack is still in alpha and has a lot of hiccups, but the metrics it is putting out are nothing short of jaw-dropping. When it matures enough, you can imagine a world where your app is updating nearly instantly in your browser as you type each keystroke.

Next 13 was also announced at NextConf and adds a lot of features to keep them at the front of the pack like Layouts and React Server Components. We’re big fans.

The constant innovation and pushing the boundaries of what a meta framework can do, earn them the number 1 spot on our 2023 hype list.

Planetscale

There is something very unique and promising about Planetscale. They are currently the only database with built-in schema branching instead of the migrations pattern. Now they also do data branching, which is like schema branching but also pre-seeds the data for you. Their other claim to fame is they are backed by Vitess with a MySQL interface. What does that mean? You can pretend like it's good ol' MySQL from the outside, but behind the scenes, it scales horizontally and is highly available. Vitess powers some huge numbers from Slack, and it’s able to serve over 500,000 queries every second at peak and over 20 billion a day. I think it can handle your workload pretty well.

Planetscale adds a very generous free tier on their platform as well as automated data backups and an insight panel that is useful when looking for usage as well as problem areas that you can improve.

They've raised over $100M and I believe they have a bright future with companies looking for an easy way to handle huge workloads effortlessly.

Rust

You may have noticed Rust is having a real moment. It has great performance on the backend, typically tallying wins against Go at the expense of development time.

Rust is in just about everything these days. Figma uses it, AWS uses it in Lambda, and Discord uses it. Even NextJS' compiler has been remade in Rust.

Just while Rust has been gaining popularity, the popularity of Electron desktop apps and their memory hogging has been inversely garnering much outrage. Then along comes Tauri. Tauri provides the performance and security of a Rust core and the speed and ease of development of web technologies for cross-platform apps.

We believe we haven't hit peak Rust yet. Performance-hungry backends will be written in Rust and an explosion of performant multi-platform desktop apps are going to be pushed to us shortly.

Summary

2022 was a huge year of improvements for devs and the web. There are many things we learnt and are excited about, from things like Raycast that makes life easier and faster to things like T3 that just brings things together. Vercel seems unstoppable at the moment and I expect them to keep pushing the edge of what's possible. Supabase and Planetscale will improve our lives on the database and Rust on the backend.

Being aware of these technologies and trends is definitely essential for organizations, but the correct implementation is also challenging and not so easy. You can either spend their time and efforts on choosing, integrating, and testing a relevant technology to build your own platform, or find a partner who meets the requirements of your business by delivering a solution that offers a combination of flexibility and simplicity of use.

If you're looking to leverage digital technologies to help your business innovate, evolve, and grow, Quantum Mob and our dedicated experts can help you. Get in touch with us today and let's discuss how we can help you build innovative digital solutions for your business. Write to us at hello@qmo.io.