Hire senior Node.js developers. Running in production.

NestJS for mid-to-large codebases where a clear module structure saves the team from itself. Fastify for performance-critical APIs where you want less magic. Express when it's what the team already knows and the project is small enough that migrating would be pointless. We pick per project, and we don't rewrite a working Express app just to use NestJS.

Yes — we've shipped live dispatch platforms, collaborative editors, multiplayer presence, and notification systems. Socket.io for the ergonomics and fallbacks, native WS when you need to squeeze every last ms. Redis pub/sub or NATS for the fan-out. We've debugged enough WebSocket scaling issues to know what not to do.

Structured logging (pino or Winston), OpenTelemetry traces, metrics via Prometheus or your vendor's equivalent. We don't ship code without log lines at every meaningful boundary. If your current backend has 'works on my machine' energy, fixing observability is usually week one.

PostgreSQL with Prisma or Drizzle for most new builds. Redis for cache, queues, pub/sub. We reach for MongoDB only when the data genuinely is document-shaped. We'll work with whatever you already have — Aurora, RDS, Neon, Supabase, self-hosted — without a migration pitch.

Really. We generate types from OpenAPI or tRPC definitions and share them with the frontend so the entire pipe is type-checked. If your codebase is JavaScript today, we can introduce TypeScript incrementally — we don't do big-bang migrations unless you want one.

Pick a real task from your backlog — a new endpoint, a perf fix, a refactor, a rescue. The developer ships it through your normal CI/CD and review. $500 billed up front, non-refundable. Continue and you get $500 credited against month two. Don't continue and you keep what shipped.