Technical articles and stack decisions from FeaturePeek
We're stoked to include Headway in our product stack at FeaturePeek for in-app changelogs and announcements. It's super lightweight, and offers a microblog with permalinks we can point to from our other marketing materials. We looked at Beamer too, but ultimately chose Headway for the sleek interface and generous free tier that they offer.
I think our #Frontend stack is pretty standard – but we have taken some deviations from a typical modern stack:
Flow (JS) instead of TypeScript. Flow was an easy choice 2+ years ago, as both flow and React were (and still are) maintained by Facebook. Today, it seems that the JavaScript community has settled on TypeScript as the winner. For new projects, I'd choose TS, but I don't see the point in migrating an existing project from flowtype to TS, when the end result will be roughly the same. Sure, memory usage is a bit high, and every now and then I have to kill some zombie processes, but our text editors (Sublime Text), CI scripts, and Babel are already set up to take advantage of the type safety that flow offers. When/if the React team writes React itself in TS, then I'll take a closer look – until then, flow works for us.
Yarn instead of npm. When yarn debuted, we never looked back. Now npm has pretty much caught up with speed and lockfiles, but yarn gives me confidence that my dependency installs are deterministic. Really interested in the plug-n-play (PnP) feature that removes the need for a node_modules folder, but haven't implemented this yet.
If you're a developer using Google Docs or Google Sheets... just stop. There are much better alternatives these days that provide a better user and developer experience.
At FeaturePeek, we use slite for our internal documents and knowledge tracking. Slite's look and feel is similar to Slack's, so if you use Slack, you'll feel right at home. Slite is great for keeping tabs on meeting notes, internal documentation, drafting marketing content, writing pitches... any long-form text writing that we do as a company happens in Slite. I'm able to be up-to-date with everyone on my team by viewing our team activity. I feel more organized using Slite as opposed to GDocs or GDrive.
Airtable is also absolutely killer – you'll never want to use Google Sheets again. Have you noticed that with most spreadsheet apps, if you have a tall or wide cell, your screen jumps all over the place when you scroll? With Airtable, you can scroll by screen pixels instead of by spreadsheet cells – this makes a huge difference! It's one of those things that you don't really notice at first, but once you do, you can't go back. This is just one example of the UX improvements that Airtable has to the previous generation of spreadsheet apps – there are plenty more.
Also, their API is a breeze to use. If you're logged in, the docs fill in values from your tables and account, so it feels personalized to you.
Segment has made it a no-brainer to integrate with third-party scripts and services, and has saved us from doing pointless redeploys just to change the It gives you the granularity to toggle services on different environments without having to make any code changes.
It's also a great platform for discovering SaaS products that you could add to your own – just by browsing their catalog, I've discovered tools we now currently use to augment our main product. Here are a few:
We've tried a couple REST clients over the years, and Insomnia REST Client has won us over the most. Here's what we like about it compared to other contenders in this category:
Some features like automatic public-facing documentation aren't supported, but we currently don't have any public APIs, so this didn't matter to us.
We've been really happy with Clubhouse for project organization / task management / kanban board while developing FeaturePeek. The featureset is rich and the UI uncluttered. Clubhouse is different in that it makes some assumptions on how things should be (workflow state, the relationships between stories/epics/milestones, etc). having it be opinionated from the start helps you hit the ground running, while still being editable / extensible for tweaking things to your liking.
The pricing is spot-on too – a flat $10/month for teams of 10 or less. This really made it attractive to us to try out.
If you think Trello is too basic / lightweight but Jira is too full-featured / heavy, you should give Clubhouse a shot – I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Our #Frontend at FeaturePeek uses the Evergreen UI framework as a starting point for our basic UI primitives like buttons, modals, and inputs. I chose this library not only because it's beautiful and frequently updated, but also because the CSS-in-JS model inherited from ui-box is such a joy to work with.
Any CSS property can be passed to any UI component as a prop. Evergreen then compiles atomic classes from the rules used, and injects the styles in the head for every page. The easiest way I've encountered to achieve critical CSS. It even hydrates into the Next.js SSR scripts, so styles aren't lost when JavaScript is disabled.
