Here at ON, we intentionally cast a wide net on the technologies that we work with. Across websites, web apps, native apps, installations, and platforms, we don’t tie ourselves to just one, because we recognise that there’s no such thing as “best”, but rather matching the right choices to the situation. We intentionally build flexibility into our model in order to deliver better outcomes.
Convention and conviction
Our starting point is convention and conviction. Convention: in the small range of curated tech stacks that we’ve found to be flexible, safe, and scalable across hundreds of projects. Things that just work, and guard against swimming upstream. Conviction: in knowing that these recommendations carry the weight of years of hard-won experience. Not just through launch, but growing and maintaining them alongside client teams. It’s the application of hindsight to evaluate how well the system works; and works for the people it touches: the users, the team who maintain it, and the stakeholders whose vision it must carry.
How a recommendation arrives
I often talk about holding strong opinions in order to achieve forward momentum, but being open to listening and having these opinions challenged. And that’s very much true here, in that we talk about the conventions because they fit the majority of use cases and cut through the noise; but there are sometimes situations that call for a different approach. And in these cases, it’s about finding the balance to be flexible and meticulous in evaluating the choices on their merits, and picking the right one. This might be influenced by a stakeholder’s preference, because they’re especially familiar with one system; or by the hosting and scaling considerations; or by how transactions need to be handled; or influenced by a plugin ecosystem; or a multitude of other factors.
How conviction is actually formed
And ultimately, in having this flexibility to work across multiple systems, we gain that all-important experience that feeds back into future selections. Our recommendations don’t simply come through a spec sheet, but through a deep and lived-in knowledge, and through years of operating and scaling. Technology doesn’t stand still, and neither do we in our assumptions of what fits today, and what fits tomorrow.
Ultimately, choosing the right tech stack is a mix of technical, commercial, operational, and human factors. It must be assessed with the goal in mind, but there’s also no need to reinvent the wheel, and that’s where experience wins out. And for systems that get more complex, planning for a composable stack can allow different systems to sit together in harmony, but that’s a field note for a different time.
