Choosing Your Stack in Five Minutes

Before any feature gets shipped, one decision shapes everything downstream: what kind of thing you’re actually building, and what already exists that gets you most of the way there. Get this decision right and every later chapter in this book becomes a menu you pick from. Get it wrong and you’ll spend the next six months fighting a tool that was never meant to build what you’re building.

This chapter is short on purpose. It gives you a decision guide, not a religion, and a way to have something running in under a minute so you can start feeling out whether the choice was right before you’ve invested a single afternoon in it.

• Framework, CMS, or Headless: What Are You Actually Building? walks through the three broad shapes a project takes, and which one your brief actually describes.
• Scaffolding a First Project in Under a Minute gives you the exact command to run for each of the main options covered in this book, so you can compare them hands-on instead of from a chart.