00:00:00Obviously it's all about AI these days and that's no different for me. I use AI all the time, I write
00:00:06a lot of code with AI, I use tools like cursor and so on but in this episode the focus is not on AI.
00:00:13Instead I quite often get the question which technologies should I learn in 2026 or which
00:00:18technologies are you? So I using in 2026 and that's what I want to share here. I want to share some
00:00:25technologies, libraries, frameworks I'm excited about in 2026. And this list is not necessarily
00:00:32comprehensive or complete. Instead it's just a list of technologies I personally will be using
00:00:39this year and I'm very interested in this year. And I've talked about it before. There is of
00:00:45course kind of the default stack if we're talking about web development, which I am,
00:00:50which dominates everything, especially with AI or due to AI. And that is TypeScript, React, Next.js
00:00:58and Tailwind. That is AI's favorite and you can see that in the download charts of React for example
00:01:07and it's the same for Tailwind and the other technologies. And obviously that is there for
00:01:11what you should definitely learn or use, especially if you want to find a job. It's not the only choice
00:01:17of course and I'm not saying angular view or all that stuff is bad and it can be a good niche to
00:01:23for example dive deeper into view. But that is AI's favorite. That is the favorite stack of AI. So
00:01:30naturally I'm using some of these technologies also because I did so before AI. I'm using TypeScript
00:01:37for all my projects because TypeScript is amazing. And yeah, it can sometimes be annoying to define
00:01:42more complex types, but for one, you don't need to do that that often, to be honest. And two,
00:01:49AI can help with that. AI is pretty good at writing TypeScript code and the advantage of using
00:01:54TypeScript before AI was already that it can help you catch certain errors and can lead to higher
00:02:02quality code in the end. But with AI especially, the advantage of using TypeScript is that it's
00:02:08one important building block that can give AI useful feedback on whether the code it wrote is
00:02:13valid or not, combined with unit tests, for example, or with giving AI browser access with the Playwright
00:02:21MCP or the built-in browser and cursor and so on. So TypeScript is something I always used, I always
00:02:27liked way before AI, but now with AI it's even more useful. So it's part of my tech stack too. The same
00:02:33is true for React. I also love Angular. I love Vue. I have courses on both. And if you've followed me,
00:02:39you know I love all these frameworks. And I'm not that guy that has only one favorite framework,
00:02:44but over the last years it's been mostly React that I used for all my projects and especially with AI
00:02:50and with AI knowing so much about React, though I will say it can produce quite garbage React code
00:02:57too with a bunch of use of factors on. But with all that, React is still part of my tech stack.
00:03:03Next.js has been my main React meta framework for a very long time and it's still great. I want to be
00:03:12very clear here. It's still great, but that's the first new thing maybe I really like 10 stack start.
00:03:20I've built projects with it like this build my graphic project I built as a side project last
00:03:26year and then I released it. It's a project that simplifies the process of generating infographics
00:03:32with AI like this one here which shows the finished overview of my favorite tech stack. And I used 10
00:03:40stack start for that. And I'm also using 10 stack start for other projects I'm working on. Some will
00:03:45be released soon. I'm for example also using it for this canvas drawing app you're seeing right here.
00:03:50And it's amazing. I really like it. I like that it's faster than next.js during development that
00:03:56it does certain things differently. I like its syntax. I like the simplicity compared to some
00:04:02of the next.js stuff. There are no use server use client and so on directives and therefore 10 stack
00:04:09start is definitely one of the new things I started using last year and I will continue using this year.
00:04:16Now I typically use 10 stack start with bun for the backend code and in general I use bun for
00:04:23installing packages for running my code also the dev server because it's just a faster node.js. I
00:04:30mean simply using it for installing packages with bun install is faster than npm and I really like
00:04:36bun. It is of course node.js compatible for the most part and it has a bunch of extra things built in
00:04:43that can be super useful like the built-in s3 client which allows you to interact with the s3
00:04:49object store and compatible stores like r2 by cloudflare to store objects images whatever it
00:04:56is and that's built in you don't need an extra package it's super fast it's faster than the
00:05:00official aws sdk for example and yeah for all these reasons I really like bun and therefore bun is
00:05:07pretty much my default too in all the projects I'm working on. It's of course not new and it's also
00:05:14not new for me I've used it last year too and even before that but it is my default now so that's
00:05:19definitely also something I'm using a lot. I want to point out though that node.js has come a long
00:05:26way too it's easy to dismiss node.js as kind of slow and old and bun as being much better and I do
00:05:33think bun is better in many regards but I wrote an entire article and you find it linked below in case
00:05:38you want to read it about all the modern features like typescript support native typescript support
00:05:43that are built into node.js that you can use today with the latest versions of node.js for which you
00:05:49don't need extra packages or bun because node can do more than many of us think it can. Am I still
00:05:56using bun because I like its speed and so on yes I am but if you're in a project where you need to use
00:06:02node or you just prefer it it's worth noting that you can do much more nowadays with node than a
00:06:07couple of years ago so modern node.js is definitely also something I would consider taking a look at
00:06:14again this year if you haven't in a while. Speaking of modern things I'm also super excited about many
00:06:20modern browser APIs and CSS features that are available nowadays because a lot has changed there
00:06:26over the last I guess 18 months or so there are a lot of browser APIs and CSS features like for
00:06:34example the popover API but also many others that have reached broad major browser support so you can
00:06:41use them in all those major browsers today you can use them in your applications and you can save a
00:06:46lot of javascript code or extra packages you would need to install otherwise by using these features.
00:06:52Now I created some videos on my other channel the academy channel where I dive into some of these
00:06:58things like container queries the popover APIs and I definitely recommend taking a look at these videos
00:07:05and these features in general the browser has come a long way and there is no need to solve a lot of
00:07:11problems with your own code or extra packages that can be solved just by leveraging these new features
00:07:17and it's worth noting that AI by default might not suggest or use these features because of course it
00:07:24was trained on data that had all the old code but you can teach it you can share the documentation
00:07:32copy and paste it into your prompts or share links depending on which tools you're using and then you
00:07:37can have AI write modern code too and that is absolutely something I would recommend doing that
00:07:45you teach AI all that modern stuff you really should do that because there's so much you can
00:07:52do here now speaking of AI of course we can't entirely skip it in this video and I've said it
00:07:59before in other episodes I'm using AI a lot I write all my code with AI and AI writes a lot of code for
00:08:07me now not talking about vibe coding here I want to be very clear and I know some people will still
00:08:12get it wrong I'm talking about controlling the AI steering it providing the right prompts the right
00:08:18context getting into the code yourself when you need to and really doing agentic engineering as
00:08:24it's called and therefore of course I work with tools like cursor and one tool I'm very excited
00:08:29about this year is open code for example there has been a lot of hype about it recently I started
00:08:34using it back in december so I was cool before it got cool and this is essentially an alternative
00:08:40to cloud code it's a cli tool a terminal based coding tool and you can use it to do agentic
00:08:46engineering and it's very nice has a nice interface even though it's in the terminal has a lot of
00:08:51features supports all the stuff like agents and agent skills and yeah you can really do great
00:08:57agentic engineering with open code and therefore cursor and open code for example are other
00:09:04technologies I'm using this year and especially open code is one I'm very hyped about now there
00:09:09are two things most applications need that you might be building and that's authentication and
00:09:14a database and for the database my favorites are postgres sql or sqlite both are amazing and both
00:09:21are of course not new I'm totally aware of that and I know there are more hyped alternatives like
00:09:27convex and others and I might look into those too I haven't really used them to be very honest
00:09:32but I like these old school databases for very different reasons postgres of course is very very
00:09:38popular it's super performant when using aws for example you can use managed services like rds or
00:09:45aurora to make hosting it simple if you want to but you can also self-host it with docker just need to
00:09:51make sure that you back up stuff and so on and what's great about postgres especially now in this
00:09:57modern age is of course that it supports all those different extensions like pg vector if you want to
00:10:04have a vector database for building a rag system and extensions have been there forever that's not
00:10:10new but now in the ai age we got new stuff like vector databases and you can simply do that with
00:10:16postgres without using extra tools or paying for extra services and that's one of the reasons why
00:10:21I really like postgres and why I use it for many of my projects but for some projects where I want
00:10:26to keep it simpler where I maybe don't need those extensions I really like sqlite and in case you
00:10:31didn't know sqlite is really just a file in your project the database is embedded in your code the
00:10:37code for it I mean so there is no extra database server you need to start instead it's just an extra
00:10:42package you install or if you're using bun you don't even need to do that it has built-in sqlite
00:10:48support so you can just use bun without installing anything and you can start writing through the
00:10:53database which again is just a file in your project you can back up the database by just copying that
00:10:59file somewhere else and that makes it super simple to get started and this might sound like something
00:11:05that's not really good or suitable for major projects but you would be wrong sqlite can scale to
00:11:13tens and hundreds of thousands of users and thousands of concurrent requests so it's super
00:11:19scalable and powerful of course at some point you might need more than it but that point is pretty
00:11:27far away and most applications never reach it to be honest and then this simplicity really is worth a
00:11:33lot and it's easy to think of it as a toy database but it has lots of features built in it's an amazing
00:11:38database and I'm using it for many of my production projects like build my graphic for example it uses
00:11:45sqlite and therefore that's another technology I've been using for the last years and I'll keep on
00:11:50using and I'm of course still very excited about and I just want to do some marketing for it here
00:11:56because many people think of it as a development-only database or anything like that and it's absolutely
00:12:01not now for authentication it clearly is better off for me now there are many ways of adding
00:12:07authentication to your projects and of course in case you have noticed I'm talking about the
00:12:12javascript ecosystem here but better off is a relatively new library I mean it's over a year
00:12:18old already but it's still not super old it's extremely well maintained and extremely powerful
00:12:24it allows you to roll your own authentication without writing any code related to it you just
00:12:29use this package and all the features all the auth providers it supports and it makes authentication
00:12:36a breeze it's the default for all my projects I'm using better off for all of them and it's just
00:12:43amazing and I'll keep on using it I'm still super excited about it and so yeah I would recommend
00:12:47taking a look at better off if you haven't already so let me quickly create that infographic I showed
00:12:54you and whilst that's working let me be very clear there's of course way more interesting stuff
00:13:01happening way more packages that are worth exploring and that I'll be using for example
00:13:05if I'm building mobile apps I'll use react native this is just a selection of the libraries or
00:13:12technologies I'm most excited about that came to my head now that I've thought about it there is
00:13:18absolutely a possibility that I forgot something or that something will of course emerge over the
00:13:23course of the year that maybe already exists but I haven't really used it thus far and of course
00:13:29I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and what you're excited about maybe outside of AI and
00:13:35obviously AI dominates everything and will have an impact on everything but it's worth keeping in mind
00:13:40that we as developers can and should still make choices about the technologies we use and we
00:13:46let AI work on and yeah that is a selection of the stuff I'm most excited about.