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ChecklistTechnologies

Checklist for Exploring New Technologies

My personal checklist to explore new technologies.

Bhawani SinghJuly 8, 20256 min read

As a backend-leaning full-stack engineer, it's easy to get comfortable with the stack that pays the bills and stop looking sideways. This page is my running list of technologies I've either already worked with, or want to deliberately explore next, organized by layer of the stack, so I can see at a glance where my gaps are.

Struck-through items are things I've already used in production or in personal projects. Everything else is on the "to explore" list. I'll keep updating this as I go.

Languages

The languages I reach for depending on the problem, some for day-to-day product work, some purely to understand a different way of thinking about code.

  • TypeScript
  • Golang
  • Python
  • Rust
  • Bash
  • SQL

Frontend Checklist

Most of my frontend work lives in React and Next.js, but I want to get comfortable with alternative routing paradigms, compiler-driven optimization, and content-first frameworks like Astro.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • SCSS
  • Tailwind CSS
  • React
  • React Router
  • TanStack Router
  • React Compiler
  • Next.js
  • Lit
  • Astro
  • MDX
  • Shadcn UI
  • Sonner

State, Form Libraries

I've relied on RTK for global state so far; Zustand is next since a lot of newer codebases are moving away from Redux's boilerplate.

  • Zustand
  • RTK (Redux Toolkit)
  • React Hook Form

Animation

Interfaces feel dead without motion. GSAP and Framer Motion cover most 2D interaction needs; Three.js is on the list for anything that needs actual 3D.

  • GSAP
  • Framer Motion
  • Three.js

Backend Checklist

This is where I spend most of my time. Express and tRPC are my defaults for typed APIs, uWebSockets.js has been my pick for low-latency realtime work (built Bubbly on it), and I want to go deeper on the different ways to push data to clients beyond basic request/response.

  • Express.js
  • tRPC
  • NestJS
  • uWebSockets.js
  • Socket.io
  • Bun
  • Node.js
  • TurboRepo
  • Upgrading connection from HTTP to WebSocket
  • SSE (Server-Sent Events)
  • Short Polling
  • Long Polling
  • WebRTC
  • WebTransport

Auth

Haven't rolled my own auth system yet beyond basic JWT setups (like in Bubbly). Want to evaluate these against building it myself.

  • Auth.js (NextAuth)
  • Better-Auth
  • Clerk
  • Passport.js

Payments

Haven't integrated either yet, next real-world project (probably on the ROS marketplace) will likely need one of these for vendor payouts or checkout.

  • Stripe
  • Razorpay

Email / Notifications

  • Resend
  • SendGrid
  • Nodemailer

Messaging / Background Jobs

Nothing async-heavy in my stack yet, but the ROS marketplace will eventually need queued jobs (order status updates, notifications) instead of doing everything inline.

  • BullMQ
  • RabbitMQ
  • Kafka

DB, ORMs, DB Tools

PostgreSQL and Drizzle are my daily drivers, especially after building out the @repo/db package with PostGIS support. The list of Postgres-adjacent CLI tools below is mostly ops-side stuff I've bumped into but haven't gone deep on, things like WAL management and connection pooling that matter more once you're running this in production at scale.

  • PostgreSQL
    • PostGIS
    • PGBouncer
    • pgbadger
    • pgxn
    • pg_graphql
    • pg_catcheck
    • pg_partman
    • pg_proctab
    • pg_stat_statements
    • psql
    • pg_dump
    • pg_restore
    • pg_basebackup
    • pg_rewind
    • pg_upgrade
    • pg_waldump
    • pg_walrec
    • pg_waltrun
  • neonDB
  • Supabase
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • SQLC
  • pgx
  • Prisma
  • Drizzle ORM
  • pgvector

Golang

Still early with Go, so this section is basically my learning roadmap: stdlib first, then a router, then gRPC once I'm comfortable with the basics.

  • net/http (stdlib)
  • Gin
  • Chi
  • Fiber
  • sqlc
  • gRPC

Rust

  • Tokio
  • Axum
  • Actix-web

Frontend, Backend Common Tools

Validation

  • Zod
  • ArkType

API Clients

  • Axios
  • tRPC Query (integrates tRPC endpoints with TanStack Query)
  • RTK Query
  • TanStack Query

Bundler

  • Vite
  • tsup
  • tsdown

Testing

Honestly the weakest part of my current workflow, I ship without much automated test coverage. This is the section I most need to act on.

  • Vitest
  • Playwright
  • Jest
  • Cypress
  • WebdriverIO

Dev Tools

  • ESLint
  • Biome
  • Prettier
  • Husky

GenAI / LLM Tooling

Given where the industry's heading, this is a priority list, not a someday list. Want to move past just calling chat APIs and actually understand agentic patterns, RAG, and vector search.

  • Vercel AI SDK
  • LangChain
  • LangGraph
  • OpenAI SDK
  • Anthropic SDK
  • Pinecone
  • Qdrant

CMS

Not something I've needed yet, but worth knowing for client projects that want editable content without touching code.

  • Payload CMS
  • Sanity

DevOps Tools

I run production deploys on EC2 with PM2 and SSH-based CI/CD via GitHub Actions. Containerization and infra-as-code are the logical next steps to make deployments less manual.

  • Docker Compose
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • CertBot
  • HAProxy
  • Github Actions
  • SSL/TLS
  • SSH
  • HTTP 1.1
  • HTTP 2.0
  • HTTP 3.0
  • QUIC (HTTP/3)

Monitoring, Logging

Right now I mostly rely on PM2 logs and manual checks, no real observability stack. Grafana + Prometheus is the setup I want to get running next.

  • Winston
  • Sentry
  • PM2
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • OpenTelemetry

AWS

EC2 is my bread and butter for deployment. The rest of this list is what a "proper" cloud-native setup would use instead of my current single-EC2-instance approach.

  • EC2
  • ECS
  • S3
  • CloudFront
  • RDS
  • Route 53
  • Certificate Manager
  • ECR
  • EKS
  • Lambda
  • API Gateway
  • SNS
  • SQS
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