Tech changes fast. But it’s becoming an ever-more critical component of success.
A Tech Radar is our trusty compass and map, charting the ever-shifting landscape of technology.
The FREE stack is my collection of choices, knowledge, skills, opinions and way of working.
F – Functional: Building declarative, predictible systems with clear effects, leveraging the magical and mathematical algebra ideas.
R – REPL: Eliminating the agonizing “write-compile-test” lag. Hacking live on a running system via a terminal or Emacs connection where code is evaluated live and upgraded instantly.
E – Extensible: A stack built to scale cleanly and produce extensible flexible systems.
E – Environment Control: Complete control over your entire software lifecycle. Zero hidden telemetry, no paywalls, and single-command local self-hosting.
- Adopt
- These are the technologies we’ve embraced, the ones that have proven their mettle in the trenches. They’re reliable, we’re confident in them, and they’re our go-to for new projects.
- Trial
- Here, you’ll find the promising newcomers or existing technologies we’re actively experimenting with. We’ve seen some success, they’re showing real potential.
- Assess
- This ring is for the intriguing ideas, the nascent technologies that have piqued our interest. We’re keeping an eye on them, doing our research, and perhaps even building a small prototype to see if they hold water.
- Deprecate
- This is where we park the technologies we’re actively discouraging for new work. It’s about being pragmatic and cutting our losses, preventing new projects from inheriting technical debt.
✅ Adopt #
🐂 Languages & Frameworks #
- Guile Scheme and Lisps in general
- GNU Artanis
- Emacs Lisp
- JavaScript (vanilla)
- Rust
- GTK4 Libadwaita
🧰️ Tools #
- GNU Guix
- Emacs
- Org mode
- Maak build tool and command runner
- SQLite
- PostgreSQL
- Olive CSS for all serious web projects (utility class vanilla CSS)
- Hygguile UI components (batteries included Guile Scheme UI framework built on Olive CSS)
- Veritas test framework (idiomatic unit, integration and black-box testing framework powered by Lisp - Guile Scheme)
- Scriba structured logging framework (modular log routing, formatting, and filtering, allowing developers to generate human-readable console logs during development and machine-readable logs for production environments)
⚙️ Techniques #
- Plain SQL queries
- Guix Manifests
- Guix dev shells
- Authorization and Authentication with Bewaking tokens as cookies
- Nix Flakes
- Nix dev shells
- Woodpecker CI/CD
🌐 Platforms #
- Custom low-power green VPS (Hetzner)
- Hetzner Storage Volumes with Cron-job based backups and rsync
❌ Deprecate #
🐂 Languages & Frameworks #
- Haskell (as beautiful and powerful as it is, it’s simply too complex for 9/10 use-cases)
- Scala
- ZIO (Scala)
- Svelte
- Common Lisp (rather use Scheme if possible)
- Typescript
🧰️ Tools #
- MySQL
- Servant (Haskell), API as a type
🌐 Platforms #
- Amazon AWS