Mike Fiedler

When thinking about a self-contained command line tool, I decided that I wanted to use Dart to get a better sense of how the native compilation step works, and it turned out to be a relatively easy effort, especially when leveraging the VS Code integrations for testing and debugging.

If the purpose is to demonstrate a viable website, I'd go with Heroku, as the fundamental ideas of getting up and going, and iterating quickly on your idea, and continuously delivering your updates is pretty much handled for you. Heroku is amazing for developer experience, and while costs may scale differently than other solutions, the trade-off is in your time to develop and deliver the product.

When I was evaluating languages to write this app in, I considered either Python or JavaScript at the time. I find Ruby very pleasant to read and write, and the Ruby community has built out a wide variety of test tools and approaches, helping e deliver better software faster. Along with Rails, and the Ruby-first Heroku support, this was an easy decision.