The dev.to tech stack
Ben Halpern
Aug 09, 2017
I'm starting a new tag, #ourstack. Feel free to share your organization's tech stacks.
Here's our stack:
Open Source
- Ruby on Rails
- VanillaJS more or less
- Postgres (hosted on Heroku)
Infra/Services
- Heroku
- Fastly
- Airbrake
- Skylight
- Sendgrid
- Amazon S3
- Google Analytics
- Stream
- Algolia
- Algorithmia
- Timber
- Codeship
- Codeclimate
- GitHub
Sometimes it's hard to say where to delineate the line of services that are part of the "stack" vs ones that are more just part of the business, but this is a list of tech we use that seems to fit the "stack" bill. I've also omitted a couple services that we have integrated but don't actively use at the moment. I've also omitted some stuff that seems to just be part of the Heroku default bundle. I also might have forgotten about something.
Anyway, feel free to ask us anything about what we use.
Ben Halpern
Creator and webmaster of THIS WEBSITE, I am a software developer from Canada, living in New York City.
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I love that this is RoR!! I love the look and feel of Dev.to!
Thanks so much! It's a Rails app, but we make really good use of our CDN for edge caching, so most requests are handled without even hitting our servers. Configuring this in Rails has been really quite easy because of how well things can just plug in with 90% of the work already built out.
RoR but not looks like RoR. Amazing!
🙌
A few questions:
Didn't know about Skylight, I'll check it out.
ps. you should submit the stack to Stackshare.io :-)
Algorithmia's a convenience service we can reach for when we need a pure function to process some data. Can be used to easily run some ML on a block of text, perhaps to pull out keywords. One simple use case is to determine the "background color" of a post's cover image before it loads. It's nice to have it be based on the palette of the incoming image. I looked for a Ruby gem to do this, couldn't find one that worked well, so plugged in an Algorithmia function and it worked like a charm.
We know the founders of Timber and like it in concept. It's pretty new but I think it makes logging just a bit more powerful.
Big fan of Skylight so far. And @vaidehijoshi works on it so it must be good. 😊
@rhymes You should definitely check out Skylight if you're looking for accessible performance monitoring tools on a Rails app. We also have a free 30-day trial, so you can always try it out and see how it works for you. And we're always around to help you in case you have any issues getting set up!
@ben 💞
Thank you! I'll definitely check it out in the following days.
We've been using NewRelic but sometimes I feel like I don't have the finger on the pulse, so to speak.
Glad to hear we're being of service @ben ! We pride ourselves in being an easy drop-in way to add language- and framework-agnostic machine learning to any app, and love to hear about uses like this :-)
BTW we just published a new post about SyntaxNet -- way more advanced than just keyword extraction, thought you might find it useful: blog.algorithmia.com/advanced-gram...
Keep rockin' it!
Thanks for the reply, very interesting!
I will check them out in the following days!
I always think about RoR as of something big and overloaded (currently writing a blog engine on Ruby with Sinatra+GraphQL). Since you're using RoR for the site, could you tell me if that's true or not?
For whatever reason, Rails really "fits my brain", which is one of DHH's talking points. I think it's great for building when you know your needs are going to fit generally established web patterns (CRUD, index and show views, etc.) but you don't know exactly what you need. It's really easily to quickly build out a wing on the application when you need it. It's not the "soundest software" per se, in that it's basically built around lots of tight coupling (we call them conventions 😊)
So I'd say it works for us and I wouldn't poo poo it based on reputation, but if it isn't the kind of environment you like to work in, don't force it. So much of software development is psychological.
What about the performance? Is it hard to create a GraphQL endpoint (e.g. mysite.loc/graphql, using graphql gem) with RoR?
I think it's pretty easy to build a GraphQL endpoint. We built one pretty quickly for a project and it went pretty smoothly. I think your mileage might vary on performance in this regard but I wouldn't think Rails itself is the bottleneck. If you put GraphQL in front of, say Postgres, you might be creating some query inefficiencies in the form of some leaky abstractions. This could be dealt with through some caching but you wouldn't get it for free. I would think if GraphQL was layered on top of a different type of DB, it would be more efficient. But I don't know the nitty gritty of this.
Ruby's bad for concurrency and generally running lots of code, but in this case, the query is going to be the bottleneck and I think that would be language/framework agnostic.
Thanks for your answers! I think I'll give RoR a try for my next project.
I saw yesterday when I wrote a blog-post that you guys use S3 as storage for attachment uploads. Do you have any software that either scrubs or prevents malicious files from being uploaded?
Images are processed and served by the Cloudinary CDN. S3 is only for storing and passing on to the CDN, not serving to users.
Have you dropped this on stack share?
Good call.
Love that the stack is so simple.
Check out what Built With reveals about you: builtwith.com/dev.to
i'm interested to build a SaaS like getstream. for now i want to build for notification system. is dev.to notification system use getstream?
Why heroku?
Much cheaper is to get some random vps, isn't it?
Do you use some caching for sql requests? Or everything is hitting sql db?
What's your revenue model for dev.to ?