The Best Tools for Building Software

Over the years, I’ve worked with a variety of tools and languages to build software, but these are the ones I keep coming back to:

• Games: Unreal Engine for AAA titles; Godot for everything else
• Web apps: Laravel (PHP)
• Websites: Hugo (Go) or Astro (JavaScript)
• APIs: Fiber (Golang)
• Mobile Apps: Native (Kotlin/Swift) for platform-specific; Flutter (Dart) for cross-platform
• CLI & embedded: Rust
• Scripting: Lua
• Databases: PostgreSQL for most use cases; SQLite for smaller projects

JavaScript and Python are versatile but rarely the best at any one thing.

Ultimately, the best tool depends on your project and preferences. The tools listed above are go-to, safe bets that I’d recommend to most developers when little-to-no context is provided.