Welcome to the Cave

Dioxus is my preferred framework for cross-platform mobile and desktop apps. Rust's compiler resolves abstractions at build time rather than using reflection or JIT like Dart and .NET, delivering native performance without sacrificing code quality. Dioxus brings familiar React-style patterns, and the Blitz renderer eliminates the webview issues that plague many cross-platform solutions. The result is shared business logic across all platforms with performance that feels truly native.

My web stack depends on the use case. React for full applications, Astro for content-heavy sites. This blog uses Astro because static generation gives me better SEO, faster load times, and broader device compatibility than client-rendered React. When I need dynamic behavior, Astro's React islands let me add it surgically without ballooning the JavaScript bundle. The result is pages that load instantly but can still be interactive where it matters.

Axum is my framework of choice for building APIs. It's simple and well-designed, with excellent integration into Rust's ecosystem. The performance advantage over Node, Python, or Ruby is substantial—compiled Rust handles concurrent requests with less memory and CPU. Rust's type system and compile-time checks catch entire categories of bugs before deployment that would be runtime errors in dynamically typed or GC-based languages.

I choose databases based on the data model and access patterns. PostgreSQL handles most of my relational needs—it's robust, truly open source, and feature-rich with excellent support for complex queries and data integrity. When I need flexible schemas with frequently changing fields, MongoDB's document model is the right fit. Redis serves a specific purpose: fast key-value lookups for caching and session management where sub-millisecond latency matters. The key is understanding what each database does well and using it appropriately.