Every tech stack is a sandwich: how to pick yours without over-engineering it (Part 1)

If you're learning to code, you probably have a billion-dollar startup idea in your head. Before you can execute it, you need to pick a tech stack — and you better choose wisely, because switching later is a real pain.

Every app is a technology sandwich. This is Part 1: what that sandwich looks like, what all the layers mean, and how to over-engineer one like a true professional. Part 2 shows you how to simplify it.

What is a tech stack?

There's no official definition, but every stack breaks into three parts.

Frontend — the tools that build the user interface. On the web, that's almost always a JavaScript framework. On mobile, it might be iOS, Android, or a cross-platform tool like Flutter.

Backend — the server-side runtime (Node.js, Python, etc.) plus a database to store user-generated data. Add in the cloud provider you buy your infrastructure from, and that's the backend layer.

APIs — the connective tissue. REST or GraphQL on your own side, plus the third-party services you absolutely need: Stripe for payments, Twilio for SMS, SendGrid for email. These live in the middle because they touch both frontend and backend.

Famous acronym stacks

The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is the original. It came out of the late 90s as a free, open-source alternative to expensive commercial software, and eventually spawned WordPress and Joomla.

MEAN (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node) got popular because the acronym sounds impressive. Variations like MERN (React) and MEVN (Vue) followed.

The reality: these acronyms don't actually capture everything a real stack needs. They're marketing, not architecture.

The over-engineered version

Let's build the next Myspace — needs user auth, a database, global scale. Here's what the over-engineered path looks like.

Frontend

TypeScript over vanilla JavaScript — type safety helps catch bugs early. React as the UI framework — not because it's the best or fastest, but because it has the largest pool of developers to hire from. React Native as a future mobile path.

Redux for state management — the most popular option, and the one everyone loves to complain about. It generates impressive amounts of boilerplate.

Tailwind CSS for utility classes. Sass as a CSS preprocessor. PostCSS to purge unused styles. Webpack to bundle it all.

That's a lot of tools just to show a webpage.

Backend

MySQL as the primary database — relational, great at modeling social graphs, the gold standard. Redis as a caching layer because MySQL "won't be fast enough at scale" according to an article we found.

Node.js as the server runtime. NestJS as the framework (TypeScript-native). TypeORM so we never write raw SQL. Nginx as the web server.

Docker to containerize everything. Kubernetes to orchestrate the containers. AWS as the cloud provider. Terraform to create infrastructure as code instead of clicking buttons.

GitHub for source control. GitHub Actions for CI/CD.

APIs

GraphQL + Apollo for the frontend-backend API. Stripe for payments. Auth0 for authentication. Amazon Rekognition for content moderation. Twilio for SMS.

That's a complete, highly capable, and massively over-engineered tech stack. The problem: your users will never know what's running underneath. They just want a good experience. And if you don't ship a good experience first, you'll never reach the scale that actually needs Kubernetes.

Part 2: Throw it all away — the practical stack that actually ships