What is ... your tech stack

What is it

Your stack is the technologies used to build and run your service.

Why do you need to know

At some point someone at a conference or meeting will ask you 'so what's your stack?' and you'll wonder what on earth they are asking, or fumble a list of technologies you've heard the devs talk about.

A bit more

If they are asking about a specific service, typically people will be interested in the frontend framework being used, the backend language or framework, the database, and what infrastructure it is all being run on.

Sometimes people will be asking more generally about what your organisation is using - you can be a bit more vague eg "we're a .NET house", "we mostly use ruby but some teams use python. We all use AWS services for hosting"

How much should you care

It's enough to memorise a basic answer so you don't get flustered.

"We use <language or framework> running on <infrastructure> with a <database> database"

eg:

• "We use react for the frontend and .NET Core for the backend, running on basic EC2 instances with a SQL Server database"

• "This website uses next.js to generate a static site that is published on vercel"

• "It's a meteor app with a mongo database, dockerised and running on a fargate ECS instance"

• "We used a headless CMS backed by a postgres database, with lambdas to translate the content for the static site which is served from an S3 bucket"