Originally, I had planned to go with PHP7, Symfony3 and MySQL. Giant Bomb is currently using PHP5.6, Symfony 2.6 and MySQL. My thoughts were that I would build the pops site on the newer versions of the work tech and bring back the knowledge I gained to the group.

But, on the recommendation of a co-worker, I decided to go with Laravel. It's a lightweight framework based off of Symfony. Symfony is robust but unwieldy for my needs. Laravel comes pre-packaged with a user model and authentication which gives a nice jump start to the project.

I am sticking with PHP7 because even if you write bad code, it provides a free 20% performance increase just for being PHP7. I don't know where I read this, but the information is retained in my head so it must be true.

The database I will be using is PostgreSQL, only because I decided to use Heroku as my host. The free tier. Because, it's free. And the recommended database from Heroku is PostgreSQL.

Probably don't need a caching layer at the moment. We'll see. 20% increase!