On the shoulders of giants
Design
We love Medium, Pinterest, and Flipboard and are greatly inspired by them. The gallery photo we currently use on the hompage is by Negative Space, found on Pexels. The universe we use on landing pages is by Jeremy Thomas, found on Unsplash. The placeholder colors are inspired by Van Schneider’s unique color pairings. We use many icons from Font Awesome. Also, we highly recommend the Noun Project. We’ve found a number of great icons, including the robot by Aaron K. Kim, the coins icon by Arthur Shlain, the quill icon by Hea Poh Lin, the loop icon by useiconic.com, and the sun by Andrey Vasiliev. For some mocks, we use a modified vector image by frankmib6, found on Vecteezy. Also, we love Raul Taciu's beautiful social icons.
Did we forget to mention one? Contact us at hello@refind.com—we’re happily going to add it.
Code
We write our backend mainly in Ruby and host on Heroku. We don’t use Rails but Sinatra, we use Postgres and Redis, and Sidekiq for background processes. We use a number of tools such as Librato, Skylight, Airbrake, and Logentries, and a host of gems, such as Twitter, Markio, and Pocket. Our crawlers are hosted on Joyent but we also use Mercury. For some high-performance tasks, we use Rust. We use CloudFront as our CDN and S3 for some parts.
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: we write the native parts (share extension, offline access) in Swift for iOS (using many Pods) and in Java for Android. We’ll go all native down the road.
We use git and store (most of) our repos on Bitbucket.
Project management
We’re a tiny team and work mostly remote. To communicate and to organize ourselves, we use Trello, Slack, Appear.in, and sometimes Google Docs.
