Fear of picking the wrong stack

March 2020. I had just finished my first year as managing director of a small metal manufacturing company — fourth generation, still looking for my place. Then the health department started closing businesses, and overnight I was dealing with problems nobody had prepared me for.

Some people refused masks. Others would not risk an infection. Somehow the shop still had to keep running.

After the first shock, I told myself: if we get through this, it will be with digital tools. Not a big vendor project. Small things we could actually stand up ourselves — an internal knowledge wiki, a visitor check-in so we could trace contacts if someone got sick.

I knew almost nothing about servers. Or networks. Or what a “stack” even was.

I went looking online. For the wiki, open-source software showed up fast — install it, follow the guide, try it. For the visitor flow, paid products existed, but we needed something quick and preferably free. That search put a still-young JavaScript framework in front of me: Vue.

Here is what became clear almost immediately: which technology I chose mattered less than I thought. At least at the beginning.

What mattered more was discovering that out there — blogs, YouTube, whole learning platforms — people give away their knowledge and their tools for free. A world I had barely noticed opened up. The knowledge was there. I only had to reach for it.

And it was also too much.

The sheer volume of information was overwhelming. Worse: I could see that hyped technologies disappear. jQuery had already passed its peak. The fear that followed was simple and sharp: What if I invest months in something that is already dying? Then every evening I had stolen from the business would be wasted.

Curiosity was still bigger than the fear.

I asked our IT partner for a virtual machine — a Windows server, a playground. I had never touched Linux. Terminal-only systems without a graphical interface were science fiction to me. A few hours later I had a box I could break.

I followed the wiki install guide. It worked on the first try. That feeling — something running because I made it run, without buying a consultant day or locking us into a monthly subscription — was better than I expected.

Software companies often want predictable recurring revenue. Fair enough. But sometimes you need to try something before you know whether you will keep it. Being able to install, poke, and fail yourself opens doors a sales call never will.

Then came the next small wins: get the page off localhost, reach it from another machine, give it a name instead of an IP address. Each step felt huge. None of them required me to become a professional developer overnight.

Then I discovered VS Code. Remember: it was 2020. No Copilot. No Claude. I had to learn the hard way — which, looking back, was a gift. React, Vue, and Angular were all loud. After a few videos I picked Vue and simply rebuilt what I saw.

I still do not think the important decision was Vue.

The important decision was to start — knowing the choice might be “wrong,” and doing it anyway.

If you run a business and wonder whether coding is for you: you do not need the perfect stack. You need one real problem, one afternoon, and the nerve to follow a tutorial until something loads in the browser. The fear of wasting time on the wrong tool is real. So is the cost of waiting for permission to try.