Technologies that help me deliver.
Amongst such a plethora of programming languages, frameworks, services, tools and packages, here are the ones I work with the most in my software engineering endeavours.
Languages
TypeScript
I've loved writing TypeScript ever since I first experimented with it in 2017. Flexible, strongly-typed, across both front- and back-end, it really has left vanilla JavaScript in the past, and good riddance. JS is dead, long tive TS!
PHP
I first learnt procedural PHP and somehow built an e-commerce website this way for my final year project, with countless hours spent producing thousands and thousands of lines of code, it was a real mess. Luckily after uni I learnt object oriented programming (OOP) and for many years enjoyed PHP as my back-end technology of choice, made especially easy with the power of Laravel.
Frameworks
React
Despite a brief period spent experimenting with Angular & Vue, it was React that won the battle of the front-end frameworks when I started using it at Pod Point in 2017 - and I haven't looked back. With the introduction of Next.js as a full-stack framework, React goes from strength to strength.
Laravel
PHP gets a bad rep, but it shouldn't, thanks to Laravel. Whilst nowadays I like to use TypeScript on both front- and back-end for ease in a serverless AWS architecture, for years Laravel served as the default approach for building APIs and full-stack applications alike.
Tailwind CSS
After the early years spent with Bootstrap & jQuery it took a little while attempting to establish bespoke design systems before eventually settling with TailwindCSS as the perfect framework to provide the perfect balance of flexibility and consistency to produce beautiful user interfaces.
React Native
Whilst I did a tiny bit of mobile app development at Pod Point and in my personal time, it wasn't until 2024 that I really got stuck into it, React Native being the obvious choice coming from a web development background with React experience.
Services
AWS
For the past 7 years and counting, AWS has been my infrastructure service provider of choice. It lends itself perfectly towards my preference of a hassle-free, scalable, serverless architecture and allows me to focus on the meaningful product development. At this point I'm pretty familiar with a good handful of their services, including - but not limited to - Lambda Functions, API Gateway, S3, SNS, SQS, SES, EventBridge, DynamoDB & RDS.
Expo
My prior experience of mobile app development was that managing builds, dependencies and deployments was an absolute nightmare, well that hasn't been the case so far with the Food Experience App with thanks to Expo doing all the heavy lifting.
Packages
tRPC
A fairly recent addition to the technology toolkit, tRPC has proved a fantastic solution when building back-ends for front-ends (BFFs), providing a fantastic developer experience with it's typesafety and a refreshing alternative to the repetitiveness of creating RESTful APIs and HTTP clients for their consumers. Its leverage of Zod adding further power and helping us keep DRY.