I never use anything truly lightweight for personal projects or prototypes. For one thing, then I'd have to learn a lightweight stack in addition to the heavier ones for real projects, plus, they're not usually that fast and easy to use.<p>I'm a fan of Node/Svelte(I've never started a new project in it but I have enjoyed working on existing stuff in it).<p>For new work I'll almost always be using Python, CherryPy, and a Vue3/Websockets based approach, usually with quite a few supporting libraries.<p>I also use a lot of Mako templating, but I'm moving away from that as Mako doesn't have good IDE support and it can get in the way of realtime responsiveness.<p>If there will be content involved, which there often is, I'll use Showdown to render markdown.<p>One technology I really want to work with more is Microsoft's Adaptive Cards, they will likely be finding their way into my projects soon.<p>Against my better judgement I do have a project idea in mind at the moment, but it would need either Dart or Kotlin, and the backend would probably be MQTT, although anything personal project sized would be trashed instantly by a DDoS since part of the design involves an open public backend with all the security on the client.<p>And of course, if my project is embedded, ESP32+Arduino all the way, At $5 or so, there's rarely any reason to use a bare MCU or anything that doesn't have WiFi unless you're doing mass production.<p>One thing I <i>never</i> touch for anything personal is a database. No postgres, no mysql, none of it. If I need one I use sqlite.<p>If nobody is paying for I'm not doing sysadmin work at home. My stuff is all unzip and run, with dependencies from the Debian or language package repos.<p>I don't use Docker or Kubernetes or anything like that, because I avoid anything microservice-like, or anything that requires an external process with nontrivial configuration. Needing an MQTT broker or relying on an external daemon for something very big and complex like Zigbee2mqtt is about as far as I'll go.<p>Even apache/php is too much config for me. I have very little tolerance for system level configuration needed to support one specific app, and messing with containers isn't my idea of fun either.