Skip to main content

The behind-the-scenes story of how we chose our tech stack, what went wrong, and why we changed course

The Tech Stack We Chose (And Why We Switched Midway)

The Tech Stack We Chose (And Why We Switched Midway)

By Rexman
Published: 13/06/2025 – Behind the Scenes Series #2

🧠 The Master Plan

Choosing a tech stack was easy. Or so we thought. We had a Notion page comparing Postgres vs Mongo, Firebase vs Supabase, React vs Vue vs SvelteKit. We were acting like we were choosing our life partner — when really, we just needed a stack that wouldn’t break in 3 weeks.

We picked:

  • Frontend: React Native with Expo
  • Backend: Supabase (Postgres + Auth)
  • Storage: Supabase Storage
  • AI integration: Claude (Anthropic)
  • Deployment: Vercel

💥 Reality Bites

Week 1 was smooth. By Week 2, cracks appeared.

  • Supabase’s Postgres was fine… until our expensive queries choked it.
  • React Native was okay, but we hit prop-passing hell fast.
  • Claude integration was awesome… until we realized we needed more dynamic prompt chaining and Claude didn’t support that natively.
“Why is our dropdown breaking again?” — our frontender, twice a day.

🔄 The Course Correction

By Week 3, we knew we had to pivot — but only where it hurt most. We didn’t ditch everything. We changed enough to stay sane:

  • Moved login/email from Supabase to Claude + SendGrid for more flexibility
  • Switched Postgres → PlanetScale (MySQL-based, better handling of concurrent writes)
  • Replaced dropdowns and navigation logic with Radix + Expo Router

The app became 40% faster and way easier to debug.

📚 Lessons Burned into Our Brains

  • Speed > perfection: Don’t overplan the stack — plan for change.
  • Invest in dev experience early: Bad structure compounds pain fast.
  • Optimize for iteration, not architecture.

We still use Supabase in other projects. It just wasn’t right for this one at this stage.

⚖️ What Stayed

Some things did work well and stayed untouched:

  • Vercel + Edge Functions (fast deploys, perfect for MVP)
  • Claude for summaries + analysis (low latency, clean output)
  • Figma for quick UI updates

🎯 The Real Takeaway

“The right stack is the one that helps you ship fast — and makes you want to come back and improve it.”

🔜 Coming Up Next

Next Friday: Debugging Hell: One Bug That Nearly Crashed Our Launch

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Behind the Scenes: How Generative AI Creates Music, Art, and Stories

When Machines Dream We’re living in a world where machines don’t just compute—they create. Generative AI is writing novels, composing symphonies, and painting pictures. But what’s really going on behind the screen? This post pulls back the curtain to reveal how generative AI actually creates —from writing a bedtime story to composing a lo-fi beat. Whether you're a curious creator or tech enthusiast, you’ll see the art of AI through a new lens. What is Generative AI, Really? Generative AI uses machine learning models—especially neural networks—to generate new content based on learned patterns. Trained on vast datasets, these models produce original music, images, and text based on user prompts. 1. How AI Writes Stories (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) Step-by-step: You give a prompt: “Write a story about a lonely robot who finds a friend in the forest.” The model (like ChatGPT) draws on its training data to predict and generate the most likely next word, sentence, or paragr...
Post a Comment
Read more

PromptCraft Series #1 : Blog series on the Art and Science of prompt engineering

Welcome to the Era of No-Code Prompt Engineering New post every Monday 🧠 What’s This Series About? Welcome to PromptCraft — your new favorite blog series dedicated to the art and science of prompt engineering for no-code platforms like Lovable , Replit , and more. Every Monday, we’ll dive deep into how non-developers and AI creators can craft powerful, accurate, and elegant prompts to build everything from chatbots and virtual assistants to internal tools, automations, and AI-powered apps — no coding required . Whether you're a startup founder, solopreneur, educator, content creator, or just a curious explorer, this series is for you. 🔍 What is Prompt Engineering? Prompt engineering is the process of crafting precise, structured, and smart inputs (prompts) that guide large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to produce useful, high-quality outputs. But unlike traditional coding, prompt engineering speaks the language of humans , not machines. It’s like programming in plai...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to create a bootable USB pendrive in Linux

If it was windows, it would be much easier ...for we have the universal USB installer. In Linux, we can't use that: however, we need not worry, guys have done a great job by creating a much easier tool to do the work. The tool is called gparted. It is a nice GUI tool to do our work. So lets see how we shall do it. >Open the terminal . >Now type: sudo apt-get install gparted ......This will install the tool ...well and good if you had it from before. >Now type: sudo apt-get install-3g ( gparted installed this as default for me...just see if it did for you). >Now open the tool via: System>Administration>Gparted Partition Tool >Now you are almost done....Click the File and choose the drive for the particular USB. >Right click on the drive when it is enlisted. See Manage Flag menu and click to enable boot. >Now go to Partition menu at the top panel and format the drive as ntfs . This will keep the work as pending operation ...click the cor...
Post a Comment
Read more