Does someone know a tutorial for people like OP? Someone that knows programming but not modern web dev. I want to write such tutorial. > It's hard to build a

Does someone know a tutorial for people like OP? Someone that knows programming but not modern web dev. I want to write such tutorial. > It's hard to build a mental model when things are happening at 4 level of abstractions away I feel you.. the JS ecosystem needs more guidance. I'm trying to do that with Reframe: https://github.com/reframejs/reframe https://github.com/reframejs/reframe. The goal of Reframe is to precisely to guide you through web dev and give you a good and simple start. It's new and work-in-progress though. Feel free to hit me up on discord (https://discord.gg/kqXf65G https://discord.gg/kqXf65G) if you have questions about web dev. I'm happy to help. Also, I'm looking for people to write such "modern frontend for backend developers" tutorial, if someone reading this would be up for it. ---- As for your questions: > What is a minimal set of JS/CSS frameworks, templating engine, deployment tools, IDE I need? If you need an SPA then I'd recommend https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel. There is also https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app which is super popular but I don't recommend it. (Because it's based on Weback and I believe that Parcel will eventually become the state of the art to build web assets.) If you need SSR then https://github.com/zeit/next.js https://github.com/zeit/next.js. If you are not sure whether you need an SPA or SSR, let me know. I'm happy to elaborate. Another option is to use to the web framework I'm building (https://github.com/reframejs/reframe https://github.com/reframejs/reframe). The nice thing about it is that it allows you to build an SPA as well as an SSR app. And even better is that you can start with an SPA and easily switch to SSR later and vice versa. This means that you can start hacking today while later deciding whether SPA or SSR is right for you. So my (biased) recommendation would be to use Reframe. Although Reframe is new and if you're not an early adopter, then it's probably nothing for you right now. > a plethora of frameworks, transpiled languages, etc such as: Gulp, Typescript, JSX, Dart, Angular, React, Bootstrap, Babel, Wordpress, Drupal, Flutter, NPM, Web assembly, Vue.js, Minification of code before deploying, jQuery, and a gazillions others I recommend to start with the simplest setup possible and later decide if you want to add niceness to your stack. That is: JavaScript with Parcel, Next.js, or Reframe. You'll eventually realize over time what you need or not. And I wouldn't even start with bootstrap, instead I would use CSS flexbox. As for API between your frontend and backend you can use https://github.com/reframejs/wildcard-api https://github.com/reframejs/wildcard-api. It's another thing I built and it's much much easier than GraphQL and REST. Which is neat to get up and running quickly. In a nutshell: start with minimalistic simple stack. You'll figure all the rest later while building your app. > Auth support (custom and Google OAuth) Just curious -- why do you need custom auth? Why not social login only?