Transcription
Obviously, it's all about AI these days for me. I use AI all the time. I write a lot of code with AI, I use tools like Cursor and so on, but in this episode, the focus is not on AI.
Instead, I quite often get the question, "Which technologies should I learn in 2026?" or "Which technologies are you, so I, using in 2026?" And that's what I wanna share here. I wanna share some technologies, frameworks I'm excited about in 2026. And this list is not necessarily comprehensive or complete. Instead, it's just a list of technologies I personally will be using this year and I'm very interested in this year.
And I've talked about it before, there is, of course, kind of the default stack if we're talking about web development, which I am, which dominates everything, especially with AI or due to AI. And that is, TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Tailwind. That is AI's favorite, and you can see that in the download charts of React, for example, and it's the same for Tailwind and the other technologies. And obviously, that is, therefore, what you should definitely learn or use, especially if you wanna find a job. It's not the only choice, of course, and I'm not saying Angular, Vue, stuff is bad, and it can be a good niche to, for example, dive deeper into Vue, but that is AI's favorite, that is the favorite stack of AI.
So naturally, I'm using some of these technologies also. So before AI, I'm using TypeScript for all my projects because TypeScript is amazing. And yeah, it can sometimes be annoying to define more complex types, but for one, you don't need to do that that often, to be honest. And two, AI can help with that. AI is pretty good at writing TypeScript code. Advantage of using TypeScript before AI was already that it can help you catch certain errors and can lead to higher quality code in the end, but with AI especially, the advantage of using TypeScript is that it's one important building block can give AI useful feedback on whether the code it wrote is valid or not. Combined with unit tests, for example, or with giving AI browser access with the Playwright MCP or the built-in browser in Cursor and so on. So TypeScript is something I always used, I always liked way before AI, but now with AI, it's even more useful, so it's part of my tech stack too.
The same is true for React. I also love Angular, I love Vue. I have courses on both, and if you've followed me, you know I love all these frameworks. Has only one favorite framework, but over the last years, it's been mostly React that I used for all my projects and especially with AI. And with AI knowing so much about React, though I will say it can produce quite garbage React code too with a bunch of use of effect and so on, but with all that, React is still part of my tech stack.
Next.js has been my main React meta-framework for a very long time, and it's still great. I wanna be very clear here. It's still great, but that's the first new thing maybe. I really like TanStack Start. I've built projects with it, like this Build My Graphic project I built as a side project last year and then I released it. It's a project that simplifies the process of generating infographics with AI, like this one here, which shows the finished overview of my favorite tech stack, and I used TanStack Start for that. And I'm also using TanStack Start for other projects I'm working on. I'm, for example, also using it for this canvas drawing app you're seeing right here, and it's amazing. I really like it. I like that it's faster than Next.js during development, that it does certain things differently. I like its syntax. I like the simplicity compared to some of the Next.js stuff. There are no "use server," "use client," and so on directives, and therefore, TanStack Start is definitely one of the new things I started using last year, and I will continue using this year.
Now I typically use TanStack Start with Bun for the backend code, and in general, I use Bun for installing packages, for running my code, also the dev server because it's just a faster Node.js. I mean, simply using it for installing packages with "Bun install" is faster than NPM, and I really like Bun. It is, of course, Node.js compatible for the most part, and it has a bunch of extra things built in that can be super useful, like the built-in S3 client, which allows you to interact with the S3 object store and compatible stores like R2 by Cloudflare to store objects, images, whatever it is, and that's built-in. Package. It's super fast, it's faster than the official AWS SDK, for example, and yeah, for all these reasons I really like Bun, and therefore Bun is pretty much my default too in all the projects I'm working on. It's of course not new, and it's also not new for me. I've used it last year too, and even before that, but it is my default now, so that's definitely also something I'm using a lot.
I wanna point out though that Node.js has come a long way too. It's easy to dismiss Node.js as kind of old and Bun as being much better, and I do think Bun is better in many regards. But I wrote an entire article, and you find it linked below in case you wanna read it, TypeScript support, native TypeScript support that are built into Node.js that you can use today with the latest versions of Node.js for which you don't need extra packages or Bun because Node can do more than many of us think it can. Am I still using Bun because I like its speed and so on? Yes, I am. But if you're in a project where you need to use Node or you just prefer it, it's worth noting that you can do much more nowadays with it than a couple of years ago. So modern Node.js is definitely also something I would consider taking a look at again this year if you haven't in a while.
Speaking of modern things, I'm also super excited about many modern browser APIs and CSS features that are available nowadays because a lot has changed there over the last, I guess, 18 months or so. There are a lot of browser APIs and CSS features like, for example, the popover API, but also many others that have reached broad major browser support, so you can use them in all those major browsers today. You can use them in your applications of JavaScript code or extra packages you would need to otherwise by using these features. Now, I created some videos on my other channel, channel, where I dive into some of these things, APIs, and I definitely recommend taking a look at these videos and these features in general. The browser has come a long way, and there's no need to solve a lot of problems with your own code or extra packages that can be solved just by leveraging these new features. And it's worth noting that AI by default might not suggest or use these features because, of course, it was trained on data that had all the old code, but you can teach it. You can share the documentation, copy and paste it into your prompts or share links depending on using, and then you can have AI write modern code, and that is absolutely something I would recommend doing, that you teach AI all that modern stuff. You really should do that because there's so much you can do here.
Now, speaking of AI, of course, we can't entirely skip it in this video, and I've said it before in other episodes. I'm using AI a lot. I write all my code with AI, and AI writes a lot of code for me. Now, not talking about "vibe coding" here. I wanna be very clear, and I know some people will still get it. I'm talking about controlling the AI, steering it, providing the right prompts, right context, getting into the code yourself to, and really doing agentic engineering as it's called. And therefore, of course, I work with tools like Cursor. And one tool I'm very excited about this year is OpenCode, for example. There has been a lot of hype about it recently. I started using it back in December, so I was cool before it got cool. And this is essentially an alternative to. It's a CLI tool, a terminal-based coding tool, and you can use it to do agentic engineering, and it's very nice, has a nice interface even though it's in a terminal, has a lot of features, like agents and agent skills, and yeah, you can really do great agentic engineering with OpenCode. And therefore Cursor and OpenCode, for example, are other technologies I'm using this year. Is one I'm very hyped about.
Now, there are two things most applications need that you might be building: a database. And for the database, my favorites are PostgreSQL or SQLite. Both are amazing, and both are of course not new. I'm totally aware of that, and I know there are more hyped alternatives like Convex and others, and I might look into those too. I haven't really used them to be very. But I like these old-school databases for very different reasons. Postgres, of course, is very, very popular. It's super performant. When using AWS, for example, you can use managed services like RDS or Aurora to make hosting it simple if you want to, but you can also self-host it with Docker. Just need to make sure that you back up stuff and so on. And what's great about Postgres, especially now in this modern age, is, of course, that it supports all those different extensions like pgvector if you wanna have a vector database for building a RAG system. And extensions have been there forever, that's not new, but now in the AI age, we got new stuff like vector databases, and you can simply do that with Postgres without using extra tools or paying for extra services. And that's one of the reasons why I really for many of my projects. But for some projects where I wanna keep simpler, where I maybe don't need those extensions.
And in case you didn't know, SQLite is really just a file in your project. The database is embedded in your code, I mean. So there is no extra database server you. Instead, it's just an extra package you install, or if you're using Bun, you don't even need to do that. It has built-in SQLite support, so you can just use Bun without installing anything, and you can start writing to the database, just a file in your project. You can back up the database by just copying that file somewhere else, and that makes it super simple to get started. And this might sound like something that's or suitable for major projects, but you would be wrong. SQLite can scale to... tens and hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of concurrent requests, so it's super scalable and powerful. Of course, at some point, you might need more than it, but that point is pretty far away, and most applications never reach it, to be honest. And then, this simplicity really is worth a lot. And it's easy to think of it as a toy database, but it has lots of features built in. It's an amazing database for production projects, like Build My Graphic, for example. It uses SQLite, and therefore, that's another technology I've been using for the last years, and I'll keep on using, and I'm still very excited about. And I (laughs) just wanna do some here because many people think of it as a development only database or anything like that, and it's absolutely not.
Now, for authentication, it clearly is BetterAuth for me. Now, there are many ways of adding, and of course, in case you have noticed, I'm talking about the JavaScript ecosystem here. But BetterAuth is a relatively new library. I mean, it's over a year old already, but it's still not super old. It's extremely well-maintained and extremely powerful. It allows you to roll your own authentication without writing any code related to it. You just use this package, the auth providers it supports, and it makes authentication a breeze. It's the default for all my projects. I'm using BetterAuth for all of them, and it's just amazing. And I'll keep on using it. I'm still super excited about it. Recommend taking a look at BetterAuth if you haven't already.
So, let me quickly create that infographic I showed you. And whilst that's working, let me be very clear. There's, of course, way more interesting stuff happening, way more packages that are worth exploring and that I'll be using. For example, if I'm building mobile apps, I'll use React Native. This is just a selection of the libraries or technologies I'm most excited about that came to my head now that I thought about it. There is absolutely a possibility that I forgot something or that something will, of course, emerge over the course of the year, already exists but I haven't really used it thus far, and of course, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. Excited about, maybe outside of AI. And obviously, AI dominates everything and will have an impact on everything, but it's worth keeping in mind that we, as developers, can and should still make choices about the technologies we use and we let AI work on. And yeah, that is a selection of the stuff I'm most excited about.