// Articles
Guides, tutorials, and comparisons to help you build better backend applications.
OpenTofu kept Terraform's model under an open source license. These are the best alternatives in 2026, now that agents write most of the code.
The best Convex alternatives in 2026 for teams that need SQL and more choice over how and where their backend runs.
A PaaS is a runtime you deploy to; an IDP is a self-service layer over infrastructure you own. Where they differ on control, ownership, and lock-in, and when each fits.
What real module boundaries look like, how to keep them from rotting, and exactly what you trade against microservices
Why teams are consolidating, how AI agents change the tradeoff, and a framework for deciding
Hono ran cheapest in our AI-readiness benchmark and collapsed worst when the test suite started probing for production-readiness.
Fastify was the closest non-Encore result in our AI-readiness benchmark, and reaching that result still cost about twice as many tokens.
Claude Code on NestJS cost about twice as many tokens as the same agent on Encore, and shipped fewer working production-readiness checks.
What Claude Code shipped when we gave it the same backend tasks on Express and on Encore.
Evaluating NestJS, Encore, Moleculer, Fastify, and Hono for distributed systems
Schemas, resolvers, code-first vs schema-first, and what actually ships
Three TypeScript frameworks for three different positions on the spectrum