How Digg and Sprint.ly Build Software

Joe Stump, former Digg lead architect, founder of SimpleGeo and now the founder of project management tool Sprintly has been building software companies for over a decade. Here, Justin Mares of exception monitoring service Airbrake speaks to Joe to get some insight into how he approaches software development and some of the tools he uses:

Well, we of course use Sprint.ly. Sprint.ly is really our idea repository. That’s where we collaborate around thinking through ideas, posting mock-ups and wireframes, stubbing out the general requirements for different features, or whatever it is. Sprint.ly is very tightly integrated with Github. We use Github to store code and whatnot. As far as the build and deploy process, we use Jenkins for our CI server. We use Sauce Labs and Mocha Chai for frontend tests. Everything is deployed on top of AWS and we use Fabric to glue everything together.

When errors pop up, we use a number of tools to get that data. That can be everything from an exception logger to Tracelytics. I can’t say enough good things about Tracelytics; it’s an amazing product. They’re called TraceView now. Tracelytics is a competitor to New Relic. It’s in my opinion a superior product. It’s very well done. We’ve been dabbling with another product called Caliper, and Caliper is effectively a New Relic or Tracelytics for frontend frameworks. We’re a very heavy backbone app. We have that, and usually what will happen is we’ll get either a bug report from the customer or one of those systems will say something’s wrong.

The build and deploy process at Sprint.ly is 100% automated. You push a button to deploy. So the tool chain that we have, you use AWS with Chef and Fabric. So I can literally do “make app server” and 15 minutes later I have a fully functional, production-ready app server.

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