Engineering Tech Radar

React Server Components reduce client JS payloads to near zero. Streaming suspense boundaries prevent blank screens, and route handlers with Edge runtime deliver sub-30ms API responses.

Eliminates 90% of runtime TypeError bugs at compile time. Paired with Zod schema parsing at the HTTP perimeter, we know exact payload shapes before touching database transactions.

ACID transactions, robust JSONB support, Row Level Security (RLS) for tenant isolation, and pgvector extensions make Postgres the only database 95% of businesses will ever need.

Unlike heavyweight ORMs that generate hidden, slow multi-join queries, Drizzle stays close to real SQL while providing TypeScript inference and ultra-fast cold starts.

Decouples fast HTTP ingress from heavy background tasks (email dispatch, PDF rendering, external API syncing) with automated retry backoffs and dead-letter queueing.

Utility tokens generate ultra-lean production stylesheets (under 15kb gzip). Avoids CSS specificity wars and enforces consistent spacing, typography, and color tokens.

Prevents cross-tenant data leaks even if an engineer omits a WHERE tenant_id clause in application code. Mathematically enforced at the PostgreSQL engine level.

Eliminates the complexity and bill of external vector databases (Pinecone/Milvus) by keeping embedding vectors directly next to relational user data. HNSW indexes yield sub-35ms cosine lookups.

Installs node_modules in seconds and executes standalone scripts 3x faster than Node. We evaluate it for background utilities while keeping Node.js LTS for mission-critical core servers.

Runs identically across Cloudflare Workers, Node, Bun, and Deno with negligible footprint. Ideal for isolated webhook proxy microservices.

Useful for pre-filtering sensitive client documents before sending to cloud APIs. We monitor memory footprint and latency tradeoffs on small cloud VPS instances.

High value for multi-week human-in-the-loop approval workflows, though setup overhead is only justified for complex enterprise scale.

Abstracts SQL so heavily that teams ship queries fetching 50,000 rows into memory just to display 10 items. We prefer explicit, type-safe SQL builders like Drizzle.

Small teams spend 60% of their maintenance hours debugging ingress controllers, Helm charts, and pod networking instead of shipping product. Managed platforms (Vercel, Railway, Fly.io) deliver better reliability with zero overhead.

Massive component libraries that override CSS and introduce hydration layout shifts. We favor headless primitives (Radix) with tailored Tailwind styling.

Sending ungrounded prompts directly to LLMs without schema validation, fallback models, or vector context produces hallucinated outputs and unpredictable costs.