What principles should a new company base it’s technology stack decisions

Options available for web and mobile development

I tried to put down some of the principles that were in my head about long term technology stack decision making for a company . I’m not sure if the list is comprehensive or not or that the principles are in the right order. I just tried to dump everything in my mind as a first draft based on my limited dev experience and working with dev teams. Would love to hear your comments and iterate.

1. All other things being equal, We want to choose a language and framework that will help us develop a faster, better, cheaper product for our customers.

• As a young company you have to align yourself to using technologies that will deliver the most consumer delight

2. After the above consideration, All other things being equal, you want to choose a language that is more popular than others

• You want developers in the company to develop deep competency in these languages
• You want it to be easy to hire developers and test their knowledge
• I think it is important for a company to stick to few popular languages which allows developers to work on multiple projects.
• If you ever decide to change frameworks or use new libraries with the same underlying language, the developers can switch quickly

3. After the above considerations, All other things being equal, You want to choose a framework that is more popular or growing in popularity than others

• More popular frameworks mean more existing libraries, libraries with fewer bugs, and more questions and support online
• Easier to hire developers and bring them onboard faster

4. After the above considerations, All other things being equal, You want to choose a framework that will reduce development effort and lead to fewer codebases.

• You would want to use frameworks that will enable you to build mobile web and desktop web in the same codebase or for both android or ios using the same codebase. Being able to build cross platform will lead to more effort going into smaller codebase and will lead to fewer bugs / better product.

5. After the above considerations, All other things being equal, You want to choose a framework that is aligned with the current frameworks in the company so that developers can switch easily and contribute to multiple projects

• If you choose frameworks that are aligned, youcan have developers easily more from one framework to another, follow best practices etc

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As a thought experiment, If we assume that the above principles are true and a company is building a very generic Web, Mobile application (No fancy graphics / games, AR/VR etc).

Then my current stack recommendation that satisfies the above principles to a significant extent would be:

• react framework for front end mobile web and desktop web
• react-native as Mobile Android and iOS framework
• Nodejs as backend with Lambda functions so that you don’t worry about server deployment etc

This stack will have the following advantages :

• This way the company has to only rely on Javascript developers
• The developers can move easily between web, mobile and backend
• The developers for mobile and web can move very easily as the frameworks are very aligned
• There is a possibility of code reusability between web and mobile as the model and controller could be designed to be the same between mobile and web codebases.The above recommendations are based on the current trends as seen in the below stack overflow graphs

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Would love to hear your feedback. As I said, I’m still learning and this is a first draft and if you can point me to better resources on this topic, I will most appreciate it.