G'day — Here's Why We Built OzStack

If you've ever tried to pick a tech stack for a greenfield project in Australia and ended up with seventeen browser tabs, three conflicting Reddit threads, and a Hacker News comment from 2019 telling you to "just use Rails", you're the person we built this for.

OzStack is a developer platform for the Australian tech community. We launched it because we kept having the same conversation — in Slack DMs, at Sydney meetups, over bad conference coffee — and that conversation always went something like:

"What stack would you actually use if you were starting this thing today?"

The honest answer is: it depends. But it depends on what, specifically, in the context of Australian engineering teams, AUD salaries, Sydney/Melbourne hiring markets, and AWS ap-southeast-2? That question was harder to answer, and nobody had really tried to answer it properly.

What we actually built

OzStack has three parts that we think belong together.

1. The Stack Wizard

A 7-step interactive wizard (yes, the Wizard of Oz metaphor is intentional, yes we committed to the bit) that asks you real questions:

What kind of project is this?
How big is the team?
What's the timeline?
Expected traffic shape — slow steady growth or spiky?
Relational or document DB, or do you not care yet?
Where are you deploying — managed PaaS, containers, or bare metal?
Language preference, if any?

Then it gives you a concrete recommendation. Not "it depends" with a shrug. Not a decision matrix you have to fill out yourself. An actual answer, with justification.

Project: SaaS product, 2-person team, 6-month MVP timeline
Traffic: Steady growth, low initial volume
DB: Relational
Deploy: Managed

→ Recommended Stack:
  - Next.js (App Router) + TypeScript
  - Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Storage)
  - Vercel (deploy to ap-southeast-2 via Edge)
  - Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
  - Resend for transactional email

You can disagree with the recommendation. But you'll have something to push back against, which is more useful than a blank page.

2. The Aussie Tech Directory

A curated directory of Australian tech companies — Atlassian, Canva, SEEK, REA Group, Xero, SafetyCulture, Culture Amp, Linktree, Deputy, and more — with:

Their actual tech stacks (the public-facing honest version, not the careers page marketing copy)
Salary ranges in AUD
Whether they're currently hiring
Engineering culture notes

We're not scraping LinkedIn and calling it done. We're building this properly, with human curation and community contributions.

3. Learning Paths

We call these the Yellow Brick Road — structured paths from where you are to where you want to be. Want to go from junior Rails dev to senior full-stack engineer at a Melbourne fintech? There's a path for that. Want to move from frontend to cloud infrastructure? Path for that too.

The goal isn't another aggregator of YouTube tutorials. It's opinionated, sequenced, and specific to what Aussie engineering teams actually use.

The stack we used to build OzStack

In the spirit of eating our own cooking:

Framework:    Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript strict mode)
Monorepo:     Nx
Database:     Supabase (Postgres)
Storage:      Cloudflare R2 (images, assets)
Deploy:       Vercel
Styling:      Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui
Content:      next-mdx-remote
Region:       ap-southeast-2 where possible

TypeScript is in strict mode. any is treated as a code smell. The admin panel has a TipTap rich text editor, Cloudflare R2 image uploads, and a dark mode that actually works — not the kind where half the text goes invisible.

The monorepo is Nx because we have plans to add more apps and we wanted the boundary structure from day one rather than extracting it painfully later.

Why now

A few things converged.

Australian developer salaries have caught up significantly with comparable US roles — remote work helped. The local tech ecosystem has genuinely matured: Canva is a $40B company, Atlassian has been ASX-listed for a decade, and there are real Series B+ companies across fintech, proptech, agritech, and climate tech hiring Australian engineers. The ecosystem exists. The tooling to navigate it didn't.

Stack decisions are also genuinely harder now than five years ago. In 2019 you picked Rails or Laravel or Django and got on with it. In 2025 you're choosing between 14 viable full-stack frameworks, 4 deployment paradigms, and whether to use a BaaS or build your own auth. The cognitive overhead is real, and it falls hardest on smaller teams who can least afford to get it wrong.

What's next

More wizard scenarios (mobile apps, data pipelines, internal tooling)
Community contributions to the directory — submit your company's stack
Salary data with more granularity: role, level, company stage
The learning paths, which are currently the least built thing and the thing we're most excited about

A note on the name

OzStack is a double meaning: Oz as in Australia, and Oz as in the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz is fundamentally a story about someone who feels lost, follows a road with other people who each have something they think they're missing, and eventually realises they had what they needed all along.

That's a reasonable metaphor for how most developers feel about stack decisions. You're not missing the right framework. You just need someone to help you see what you've already got and make a call.

That's what we're trying to be.

Built in Sydney. Deployed to ap-southeast-2.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road. →