Nathan General

I have found MongoDB easier to work with. Postgres and SQL in general, in my experience, is harder to work with. While Postgres does provide data consistency, MongoDB provides flexibility. I've found the MongoDB ecosystem to be really great with a good community. I've worked with MongoDB in production and it's been great. I really like the aggregation system and using query operators such as $in, $pull, $push.

While my opinion may be unpopular, I have found MongoDB really great for relational data, using aggregations from a code perspective. In general, data types are also more flexible with MongoDB.

Java in general, in my opinion, is somewhat outdated in 2021. C# is a better language, and therefore, I think ASP.NET (Core/.NET 5) should be used over it. Node.js isn't bad if you are getting started, or if you need to prototype an app. I use Node in production because of TypeScript, but .NET is a really good framework that has excellent performance.

Node.js is great if you already know Javascript. If not, JS is pretty easy to learn. There are many resources and tutorials online for JS and Node. ASP.NET (Core) is a good option if you know C# or need high performance. Node.js isn't a complete framework like .NET, so you need to add Express or another HTTP server, and Database connectors etc.

Next.js is great. I use it over standard React all the time. I haven't used Gatsby, so I can't talk about it.

Python is the best programming language for starting out as it is quite easy to learn, but it also is very powerful and you can do plenty with it. It will be useful for a long time. Python is my recommendation.

Python is the easiest of the languages to learn, and while the slowest in production, it will teach many of the basic fundamental concepts of programming, especially if you're not going to be doing anything low level or at a system level.