PRIZ Guru

An easy one this time - source control. Well, should we even think about anything else but Git these days? :) As for the repository, we use Bitbucket for only historical reasons. We used it since the time when the pricing model was more convenient than GitHub. And Bitbucket does the work for us perfectly, so no real reason to switch.

Some may wonder why did we choose Grails ? Really good question :) We spent quite some time to evaluate what framework to go with and the battle was between Play Scala and Grails ( Groovy ). We have enough experience with both and, to be honest, I absolutely in love with Scala; however, the tipping point for us was the potential speed of development. Grails allows much faster development pace than Play , and as of right now this is the most important parameter. We might convert later though. Also, worth mentioning, by default Grails comes with Gradle as a build tool, so why change?

Well, this one was simply. For many ears I was trying to use a bunch of free IDE's. Some of them were kinda fine, but every now and then they were a cause of frustration. At some point, a decided to spend the money for an IDE that everyone talks about. IntelliJ IDEA is the one. Since then, I never looked back and even happy to extend the subscription. So, for the company it was not even a question of what to use. :)

One of our battles at the very beginning of the road was choosing the right database. In fact, our first prototype was built on MySQL and back then nothing else was even under a consideration (don't ask me why). At some point, I was working on a project which was running on PostgreSQL and it is only then I understood the full power of it. We have over a billion of records in production instance, and we are able to optimize it to run fast and reliable. Well, now my default DB is PostgreSQL :)

We were trying to decide what is the best approach to get SSL certificates installed on our platforms. One option, of course, was to buy a certificate, manage it, install it manually, fight all the issues, etc...

Eventually, decided to user the certificates from CloudFlare. It is free!!! no need to manage it yourself, which makes it super easy and hassle free. In terms of installation, since all of our stuff in on DigitalOcean, the easiest way to install the certificates was to terminate them on LoadBalancer. Again, the setup is really easy, and no need to manage anything on your origin host side.

Recently released all new and beautiful website. We decided to go with a standard stack of WordPress on PHP, MySQL and Ubuntu . The main reason for this decision is to make the website management as easy as possible, since we need to concentrate on our product development. Besides, there are so many options to outsource this kind of work, as WordPress is super popular (even though probably not the best (IMHO)