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‘Boring’ technology won 2025. Here’s what we picked, and why.

Our 2026 stack, the alternatives we rejected, and the one new bet we're making this year.

The 2026 stack we use, end-to-end: PHP 8.3 + Laravel 11 for custom apps, Drupal 10 for content-heavy sites, WordPress 6.7 with a custom theme for marketing. Postgres for everything new, MySQL for inherited. Redis for cache + queues. Cloudflare in front. Restic for off-site backups. Linux on Hetzner or AWS depending on data-residency requirements.

What we rejected and why: Bun (too new, too few production datapoints), edge databases (the consistency story still isn't there for our workloads), most AI-coding-assistant tools beyond Copilot (the time saved on the easy stuff is being lost on debugging the hard stuff).

The new bet: SQLite for small internal tools. Litestream for replication. Cuts hosting cost on those tools by an order of magnitude and reduces the operational surface to a single file. So far we've shipped four of these. None have hit a wall.

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