On the shoulders of giants

Design

The nice gift box background we use is by Bogdan Dreava, and the pink background with hearts is by Zamurovic Brothers, both from Noun Project. The businesswoman wearing headphones walking down the city street holding a laptop byJacob Lund from Noun Project. We use many icons from Font Awesome and by individual designers found on the Noun Project, such as the light bulb by Tara Nadhifa Salsabila, emojis by Alina Oleynik, the lightning by Valeriy, the message icon by Gregor Cresnar, the image icon by Alfa Design, the dice icons by Stephen Kerr, the cog icon by Giannis Choulakis, the spider by Ahmad Arzaha, the heart icon by il Capitano, the stats icon by Ilham Fitrotul Hayat, the history icon by Shashank Singh, the quote icon by The Icon Z, the chevron left icon by Royyan Razka, the pen icon by Adrien Coquet, the highlighter icon by bezier master, the font size icon by iconsmind.com, the check icon by James Kocsis, the heart icon by Shashank Singh, the notification icon by Yana Marudova, the notification off icon also by Yana Marudova, the ellipsis icon by David, the document icon by Ralf Schmitzer, the collection icon by Markus, the link icon by Kimmi Studio, the reload icon by Royyan Wijaya, the shuffle icon by Nawicon, the headphones icon by fizae, the plus icon by Three Six Five, the bell icon by creative outlet, the three small avatar icons by iconfield, the quill icon by Hea Poh Lin, the planet icon by Srinivas Agra, the sprout icon by Blair Adams, the list icon by Nur Jana, the image icon by Mohammad Iqbal, the moon icon by Deemak Daksina, the sun icon by Andrey Vasiliev, and two arrows by Alice and kiddo. And a special shout-out goes to Van Schneider—we use his beautiful color pairings for the colors you can use for posts.

Code

We write our backend mainly in Ruby, using a number of gems. We don’t use Rails but Sinatra. Data is stored in a Postgres database, and we use Redis and Sidekiq for background processes. Our app is hosted on Heroku, images on Cloudinary, assets etc. are delivered via CloudFront, and we use Amazon S3 for some parts. Some high-performance tasks are written in Rust. Also, we use a number of tools such as Librato, Skylight, Airbrake, and Logentries.

We write our frontend mainly in Javascript (Coffee), Slim, and Sass. Sometimes we use Knockout, and we’re very happy with Gulp.

Our mobile apps are hybrid at this point: a web app with some native parts written in Swift (iOS, using many Pods) and Java (Android). We plan to go all native down the road.

We use git and store (most of) our repos on Bitbucket.