[throwaway_4ever]

I was similar; an embedded C++ engineer moving into web dev to get a project off the ground.

If you're going to write a modern web frontend like Next and Tailwind (which I agree is the right call) then I think continuing to use Typescript for your backend makes sense for sheer development velocity. Like https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app

I'd advise against Heroku compared to hosts like Vercel, Railway, Planetscale, etc.

[c7b]

Thanks for the feedback and the recommendations! A few words on why you prefer those to Heroku? Vercel and Railway seem to offer something quite similar, as far as I can tell from a brief look at the websites, Planetscale seems to be for databases only.