You're building a web app — and that choice alone stacks the deck in your favor.
A web app lives at a URL. Your users don't install anything — they open a link and they're in. It works on phones, tablets, laptops, any operating system. No app store review, no download, no "please update" popups.
Compare that to a desktop app or a mobile app: you'd need separate builds for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android — each with its own tooling, its own store, its own approval process. A web app sidesteps all of that.
Every browser on the planet runs JavaScript. It's the only programming language browsers understand natively. So if you're building anything that people use in a browser, you're writing JavaScript — there's no way around it.
That means you're going to learn JavaScript anyway, at least for the frontend (the part your users see and interact with).
Here's where Node.js comes in. Node.js lets you run JavaScript outside the browser — on your laptop, on a server. That means you can use the same language for your backend (the part that talks to your database, sends emails, handles payments) as your frontend.
This is sometimes called isomorphic code — code that can run on both the server and the client. In practice, it means you can share logic between the two sides instead of translating between different languages.
One language to learn. One set of patterns. One mental model. Instead of juggling Python or Go on the server and JavaScript in the browser, everything speaks the same language.
That's why Node.js is the default choice for web apps — and why we built Gista.js on it.