Small personal projects have very different requirements than full commercial applications. Ideally they are easy to get set-up in a weekend or two, are enjoyable to produce, require very little maintenance, and are easy on the wallet.
What are your favourite stacks for personal projects?
As someone who is deep into fancy Javascript stuff (React/Redux/Webpack you name it) at this point I would say PHP7!!
There is something special about being able to create a helloworld.php and have it sit there up and running with reasonable performance without issues so you can forget about it.
Wait until you outgrow it and then consider something else.
I regret wasting so much time (and trust me I'm no noob in this) setting up boilerplate dev environments file watchers transpilers hot module reload nginx reverse proxy server-side rendering server REST API layer client side routing graceful reloading blah blah blah.
Drop a few php files under Apache and keep marching forward.
Preach brutha! I'm so sick of these developers who are addicted to endlessly installing npm-packages without ever getting to the point of building something usable.
I think most people with common sense and self-awareness can tell.
I certainly would be surprised if anything I ever worked on became the next big anything, and I have more side projects and half-baked plans than I will ever finish.
Why do I need a 'stack' for a personal project ? Also, a weekend-or-two to set-up ?!? If it takes longer than 30 minutes to get going, it's not going to happen.
Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL hosted on digitalocean. I have written a chef cookbook that helps me configure basic server security and install Rails/Nginx/PostgreSQL with just one command. The automated server setup took around 15 minutes then I can deploy my app to it.
If you don't need a database or a dynamic interface, I have a personal site running with Jekyll. It's static and cost a few cents a month to run on Amazon S3 (until I actually get some traffic). Github Pages is also an option if you are going this route.
Ruby or Ruby on Rails, because they're the ones I'm more proficient in. I did very small projects in Node and Elixir and I would like to become better at Elixir. But the time for personal projects is small so productivity is super important.
