There's this repo. called "Reversed interview", it has a bunch of nice questions to ask in many different languages, e.g:

• What are the tasks I would do on a usual day?
• Are there any specific goals for me?
• Do you have any concerns about my application? <--- this is gold!
• How will you evaluate my performance at the end of the trial period?

Tech:

• How do you monitor projects?
• Do you have some higher level documentation? (ER diagrams, database schema)

Team:

• Who sets the priorities / schedule?
• Walk me through a typical sprint on this team
• How big are the teams?

The repository link: github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview

It really depends!

ACID Transactions + clear schema and enforced relationships between schema? PostgresQL or MySQ (probably just postgres haha)

Analytics + Performance for querying business logic? A Columnar Database.

Need to store documents? MongoDB or S3

Need super high performance? Cassandra

Need just key-value store? Use CouchDB or DynamoDB if you got the $$

One more suggestion: don't try out too many new technologies, frameworks, tools at once.

You will likely spend too much time learning, not enough time doing, and you'll lose motivation.

Learning is great, but in reasonable amounts.

I love Star Wars... but as far as living in a universe, I'd much rather live in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek is more about exploration, science, and discovery. Star Trek has food replicators and holodecks - which would improve one's quality of life drastically.

Nothings keeping you from programming the holodeck to give you a Star Wars-esque experience without actually having to live in the Star Wars universe.

Understand your worth.

Being successful as a startup is hard. More fail than succeed, which means you need to operate with that mindset.

Especially for newer developers, it can be easy to get "stuck", feeling like you owe the company something if you've been with them from the start.

But sometimes you just need to know when it's time to walk away. Very often newer startups will trade pay for equity or other incentives. But you cant pay bills with equity, and cool benefits like snacks and beer can't be put away for retirement.

If you don't see a light at the end of the tunnel, don't be afraid to walk away. You need to look after yourself too, and sometimes that means making the hard choices.