Tor Hagemann

You should use whichever had the best DX (developer experience) for your team. If you are doing a massive front-end project, consider yarn if not only because it makes it a snap to go from zero to ready. What some people say about npm being more stable or easier for smaller projects is highly true as well. (not to mention, you sometimes have to install yarn) But, note that official NodeJS Docker images ship with both npm and yarn. If you want to use yarn, put package-lock=false and optionally save-exact=true in your project's .npmrc file. Compare whether you prefer the ergonomics of yarn global add over npm install -g or see fewer meaningless warnings for the specific set of dependencies you leverage.

If you need to build a quick demo, or an internal tool, or even a landing page for your side hussle: NextJS is an awesome way to run a very lightweight CRM-like site of one or more pages, AND it also can provide flexible API endpoints for anyone familiar with modern JS, node, and/or express. I haven't used the Vercel deployment as-a-service very much, but that's there for hosting if you don't have a VPS/other Cloud at hand. Just add scripts under /pages or /pages/api and the magic happens--also, it's VERY easy to Dockerize. Read their excellent docs site, esp. re: next.config.js, which is SO much better than configuring Webpack (or whatever) yourself--even easier than react-scripts in my opinion. As an aside: TypeScript is supported but completely optional, and it's so painless to get started with one of Vercel's examples from their public repo. If you prefer Vue over React, check out NuxtJS (same idea)

Much of our data model is relational, which makes MySQL or PostgreSQL (and family) fit the API's we need to build, in order to meet the needs of our customers.

Sometimes the flexibility of a NoSQL store like Amazon DynamoDB is very useful, but the lack of consistency really impacts usability and performance long-term, compared with viable alternatives. At our current scale, we've seen huge benefits from moving some of our tables out of Dynamo and doing more in SQL.

There will always be use cases for NoSQL and key-values stores, but if your model is well understood in your business/industry: relational databases are the way to go after finding product-market fit. Always understand the trade-offs (and a few intimate details) of any data store before you add to your company's stack!