🧠 The startup that rewrote its backend in a week

Why two devs ditched Django for Node, before they even scaled.

Author

Journals GG
November 10, 2025

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Hey there.

Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋 

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

Voice AI Goes Mainstream in 2025

Human-like voice agents are moving from pilot to production. In Deepgram’s 2025 State of Voice AI Report, created with Opus Research, we surveyed 400 senior leaders across North America - many from $100M+ enterprises - to map what’s real and what’s next.

The data is clear:

  • 97% already use voice technology; 84% plan to increase budgets this year.

  • 80% still rely on traditional voice agents.

  • Only 21% are very satisfied.

  • Customer service tops the list of near-term wins, from task automation to order taking.

See where you stand against your peers, learn what separates leaders from laggards, and get practical guidance for deploying human-like agents in 2025.

Programming

📃 Battle-Tested Lessons from 10 Years in a Single Codebase
Spending 10 years in one codebase taught Jason Pollentier lessons you just can’t get from project-hopping. He learned that the best code isn’t the most “future-proofed”, it’s the easiest to change once reality proves your assumptions wrong. Over time, he realized that complexity is debt and that deleting code is often a victory, not a loss. The real skill? Designing for the unknown future, making systems that can bend without breaking.

🧠 All of the ways I use Claude Code
Shrivu Shankar dives deep into how he uses Claude Code, both as a hobbyist tinkering in VMs and as a pro building large-scale AI-IDE tooling. He argues that while the CLI agent race is heating up, success often comes down to “vibe and workflow fit” rather than raw capability. His goal? Delegate smartly, judge by results, and master features like CLAUDE.md, Subagents, and Hooks to make coding almost hands-free.

🤖 You Should Write An Agent
Building an LLM agent isn’t some arcane art, it’s shockingly simple. In just a few lines of code, you can recreate the core loop behind ChatGPT itself. The real challenge isn’t prompts, it’s context engineering, managing memory, tools, and loops so your agent stays smart. Whether you love or hate LLMs, you can’t understand them until you build one. It’s like learning to ride a bike, theory won’t cut it.

🐍 Why we migrated from Python to Node.js
Skald pulled off a bold move. rewriting their entire backend from Python (Django) to Node.js just a week after launch. The main reason? Python async pain. Django’s partial async support and sync-to-async hacks were slowing them down. With Node, they gained 3x throughput, a unified codebase, and cleaner concurrency. Sure, they lost Django’s ORM charm, but Express + MikroORM gave them the speed, simplicity, and flexibility they needed to scale early.

⁉️ How do you know that it’s coded by AI?
A Reddit user asked how people can tell when a website or codebase was made by AI, sparking a lively thread. The top answers pointed to emojis in console logs, overly detailed or redundant comments, and generic glowing UIs with purple-blue gradients as dead giveaways.

Front-End

📈 TypeScript’s rise in the AI era
TypeScript just overtook JavaScript and Python as the most-used language on GitHub in 2025, a milestone its creator, Anders Hejlsberg, never expected. He credits its rise to scalability, type safety, and AI-era reliability, making it ideal for human–machine collaboration.

🆕 What's new in Next.js 16
Next.js 16 marks a major stabilization release, async route params, Turbopack as default, and cleanup of experimental APIs. Async params unlock streaming and concurrent rendering, improving speed on dynamic routes. Turbopack, written in Rust, delivers noticeably faster builds and HMR. The update also brings React Compiler support, explicit caching APIs, and a rename of middleware → proxy. Overall, it’s a performance-focused, production-ready release aimed at modern React and AI-driven apps.

📺️ Watch this if you hate React Server Components
Theo reacted to Nadia’s deep-dive on server components, revisiting his own skepticism and eventual appreciation for them. He walks through client-side rendering, SSR, and server components, explaining how each handles data, interactivity, and performance. His takeaway? Server components only shine when paired with streaming and Suspense, not as a drop-in fix. Without rewriting data fetching, App Router won’t magically outperform Pages Router, but when done right, it’s the clear next step for React apps.

⚠️ Always remember to protect your contact forms from bots too
A developer shared how a client’s contact form got hit with spam, prompting a quick fix using honeypot fields, reCAPTCHA v3, and scoring logic to block bots. The solution worked perfectly, bots now get filtered out in the logs. Commenters warned, though, that Chrome autofill can trip honeypots, and Cloudflare-style captchas may be a more dependable defense.

AI

More Tools & Stories

🕸️ Embedding TypeScript

Have a great week, see you the same time next week!

- Full Stack Focus team :)