👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager.
Participating in hackathons is something I recommend every Software Engineer and Engineering Manager do at least twice a year!
If you're reading this, chances are you're either thinking about joining a hackathon or getting ready for one.
That's awesome! You're already ahead of the game by preparing properly.
As someone who's seen great ideas fall apart because teams wasted time, I want to share a few tools that can help you prototype FAST.
None of the tools below are sponsored or anything like that. They are just tools I genuinely love using in my day-to-day on side projects. For example my website Tools for Engineering Managers uses many of them.
Here’s the setup I’d use if I were hacking tomorrow:
Core development
Warp: The intelligent terminal. Become a command line power user on day one.
Windsurf: The world's most advanced AI coding assistant for developers.
Next.js: The React Framework for the Web.
Tailwind CSS: Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.
Framer Motion: A robust animation library for modern web projects using JavaScript, React, or Vue.
shadcn/ui: A set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform. Works with your favorite frameworks. Open Source. Open Code.
Drizzle + PostgreSQL: Object Relational Mapping with the world's most advanced open source database.
OR MongoDB Atlas: The most effective way to deploy MongoDB.
Yaak: Yaak is an offline and Git friendly app for HTTP, GraphQL, WebSockets, SSE, and gRPC.
