The Stack Nobody Recommended

The most common question I got after publishing Part 1 was some variation of "why did you pick X instead of Y?" So this post is about that. Every major technology choice, what I actually considered, where I was right, and where I got lucky. I'll be upfront: some of these were informed decisions. Some were "I already know this tool, and I need to move fast." Both are valid, but they lead to different trade-offs down the line. The Backend: FastAPI I come from JavaScript and TypeScript. Years of React on the frontend, Express and Fastify on the backend. When I decided this project would be Python, because that's where the AI/ML ecosystem lives, I needed something that didn't feel foreign. FastAPI clicked immediately. The async/await model, the decorator-based routing, and type hints that actually do something. It felt like writing Fastify in Python. That familiarity wasn't the whole reason, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a factor. The technical reasons held up though. The system han