[two2two]

I would love to do something like this. Drupal was a nightmare for me as a designer. Wordpress is much more manageable, but HTML/CSS/Javascript are king for me to have full control. What I'd like to learn next is implementing a database to cover the CMS side of things. Any resources you care to share that would put me on that path?

[malydok]

I believe that the static site generators of this day are the next step in custom web development. I'm currently working on a Gatsby.js project using Contentful as the content provider and it really feels like the stack of the future - build with all the shiny tools but send a fast, static website to the end user.

[cityzen]

If you're interested in full stack serverless solutions, AWS Amplify looks really good. It handles a lot of the provisioning of resources and creation of GQL resolvers, etc. I spent an afternoon with it a few weeks ago and it completely changed my outlook on the future of the web and CMSs.

https://aws-amplify.github.io

[adevx]

For what it's worth, I went with PostgreSQL, decided not to use an ORM but a query builder (knex.js). Knex.js gives you database migrations and is good for basic querying. It is easy to drop down to raw SQL if you need something more complex or optimized.