Choose the right package every time

Am I comfortable with a bundler that tries hard to be a whole build system? No. Does it do all that it purports to do, and is highly customizable? Yes. Am I the only one that is confused by SO many options and configurations that it's hard to separate the forest from the trees? Yes. Is it THE standard against which all other bundlers are judged upon? Yes!

After wrestling with Webpack for years, Parcel was just a joy to work with. It actually just works. It's amazing that in 2020 the most common use cases that nearly every front-end developer runs into require an insane Webpack configuration. The only small complaints that I would have about Parcel is that the documentation is a bit lacking, and it would be nice to have just a bit of configuration (coming in Parcel 2), but hey...compared to Webpack I'm not complaining.

Good ol' Bootstrap. It was the face of the internet for quite some time. I'm not so sure it has as much of a place in the modern web anymore. If you're making anything complicated, you'd use something more modern such as Material UI with React. If you're making something simple, you can get away with using something like Squarespace or Webflow; however, Bootstrap's not gonna die for a loooong time.

Vue is a great framework! It's really easy to learn and its performance is slightly faster than React. It continues to grow in popularity every year, and isn't jumping the shark with things like hooks. I use Vue for all of my projects because it's so much faster to set up, and you don't need a computer science degree to understand it.

A very capable design system, especially for Enterprise apps. Includes every imaginable component you could ask for. Design is minimalistic and clean, as you'd want an enterprise app to be. Since it doesn't have some of the eye candy offered by Material UI, it's also faster and less janky. Documentation is pretty decent, and the community around Ant very large (although some of it is in Chinese which I unfortunately do not speak). Overall great experience.

I have been impressed with the Chakra ui kit and maintainer. The components are very high-quality, with a focus on a11y (important!). It's a single maintainer right now, which always carries some risk, but the rate at which the library is updated and maintained is impressive. I hope to see more widespread support and adoption. With a little love, this could be a better alternative to some of the most popular react component kits out there today.

Ancient authentication library, built in the days when everything was built using tons of nested callbacks in NodeJS. The code works and makes sense, but is often hard to follow. Huge library of plugins that help you authenticate with others. The official documentation is pretty bad, but folks on Reddit have recommended this set of docs to help you truly understand dit: https://github.com/jwalton/passport-api-docs

I've used Express to build web apps over the past 5 years. It's proven to be dependable, reliable, and well maintained. While there are newer Node frameworks popping up every once in a while, they usually end up being short-lived fads, I always end up coming back to Express. The documentation is solid, and the amount of community knowledge is vast.