Developer Tools
Ship on day one. No excuses for 'it only works locally.'
A project that's deployed beats a project on localhost every single time. Judges want to click a link. Vercel gives you continuous deployment from GitHub in one click — every push deploys automatically. TypeScript catches errors before runtime. Zod validates your data at the edges. These tools aren't glamorous but they're the difference between a demo that works and one that crashes.
Don't leave deployment for the last hour. Deploy an empty skeleton on day one. That way you're always shipping to a live URL and you catch deployment issues early instead of at 11pm before the deadline.
Vercel for Next.js, always. Railway or Render if you need a backend with persistent state. Bun or tsx for fast local TypeScript execution. Add TypeScript and Zod from the start — the time cost is minimal and the error-catching is worth it.