Fred Jonsson
enginoid
88 points

Companies
Following

  • Scala

    QuizUp


    One of our most bug-free services is written in Scala.

    It's a great way to harvest the optimized JVM without going to Java, and its Option type and functional mapping tendencies help you avoid NullPointerExceptions.

    Don't stay away from it because you think the learning curve is too steep. You'll pick up the basics in a week, and you'll become idiomatic in less time than you think.

    Of course, you can always speed up the process with a good mentor.

  • UserVoice

    QuizUp


    We solicit feedback and ideas through suggestions.quizup.com.

  • Asana

    QuizUp


    Asana tracks our big projects and small tasks, and helps invaluably us with organizational knowledge sharing and sync.

  • Slack

    QuizUp


    Slack helps us communicate in "asynchronous real-time" -- avoiding the slow response time of e-mail, yet without walking up to someone's desk and interrupting their flow.

  • Zookeeper

    QuizUp


    We use ZooKeeper for service discovery and central management of some environment variables, such as kill switches for features and maintenance modes.

  • Amazon CloudWatch

    QuizUp


    CloudWatch -> PagerDuty/Slack. We traditionally use Datadog for alerts, but it doesn't sync quickly enough with AWS that we feel comfortable using it for alerting on critical AWS services.

  • Datadog

    QuizUp


    We're obsessed with tracking stuff via Datadog. The payment model works well for us: send as many metrics as you want and pay per machine.

  • PagerDuty

    QuizUp


    PagerDuty lets us know when some metric has gone bad in CloudWatch or Datadog.

  • IntelliJ IDEA

    QuizUp


    Invaluable for Scala/Java.

  • Vim

    QuizUp


    A highly convenient editor for changing files on remote servers. For some, a highly convenient editor for any purpose.

  • Jenkins

    QuizUp


    No CI tool is perfect, but we went to Jenkins after much consideration. A major factor was that it allows us to connect physical test devices to run mobile tests on.

  • Docker

    QuizUp


    We work in a variety of languages. Containers are useful for creating testable and encapsulated artifacts with clear boundaries, that can be verified and distributed.

    But mostly, Docker is great because with minimal effort, it lets us deploy and roll back faster than our former model of cycling in new instances on EC2.

  • Git

    QuizUp


    We use this highly distributed versioning system to store our code centrally on GitHub.com! :-)

  • GitHub

    QuizUp


    Pull requests are the killer feature (with GitHub's polish level that is still unmatched by BitBucket et al.). I love the care that has been taken to make the UI an insanely productive power tool without introducing clutter.

  • Elasticsearch

    QuizUp


    We use it for search and more creative stuff. Beyond plain search, Elasticsearch is a great distributed document store -- although, as with all other databases, not without its problems at scale.

  • Amazon CloudFront

    QuizUp


    Brings files closer to users. For some services, we also use it to serve dynamic content without the latency cost for the user of going to our main servers that are located in a single AWS region.

  • C++

    QuizUp


    If performance is critical, C++ is where we're at. If performance is not critical, we prefer higher-level languages.

  • Play

    QuizUp


    We use Play with Scala for one of our HTTP services. The combo is simple enough, although due to the simplicity of our services we have wondered whether Play is too all-encompassing for our needs.

  • React

    QuizUp


    QuizUp.com and some of our internal tools are written in React. We write it with Flux, and we're very happy about the productivity and readability that we've been able to attain with it. Give it a serious look!

  • Python

    QuizUp


    We use Python a lot. We're moving away from it, because Python's limitations in parallelism, concurrency, typing, and performance yield more costly services with a higher error ratio than other languages we've experimented with.

    Python is still our lingua franca, and we love it very much, but scale has been hard on it.

  • Flux

    QuizUp


    Definitely give this a serious look if you're doing React, since this is where we get our main readability and maintainability benefits in the react stack.

  • imgix

    QuizUp


    Imgix takes care of resizing images that we display in the app, allowing each mobile client can deliver images in a format and size that suits the device.