Redash

If there is one tool that saved me the most time and back-and-forth communication last year, it's Calendly. It makes the process of scheduling such a no brainer that it's amazing there was nothing like it before. They recently added an integration with Zoom which makes scheduling video calls even easier.

As our product is open source and gets contributions from many developers we needed something to help us with a consistent code style. We chose Prettier for our JavaScript code and autopep8 for out Python code.

As a fully remote team we needed a reliable tool for video calls. We tried appear.in for some time as it was nice to use a tool that uses web technologies and doesn't require a dedicated client. But eventually, as we needed a reliable tool, we decided to go all in with Zoom. 💯

When I saw the founders of Cypress introduce it in some conference I knew I found the tool we needed to start writing E2E testing. What I like about it is that it provides a comprehensive solution for the whole lifecycle of writing E2E tests for your application, from the API you need to write the tests to showing you why they fail. It's also nice that other tools/services in the testing space, like Percy, integrate with them now.

We started using Amazon EC2 Container Service 3 years ago because it was the easiest containers orchestration tool to start with. At the time it was missing a lot of features compared to other tools, but it was still the fastest way to deploy a container on AWS. As with any AWS product, over time they caught up and improved it significantly. Today it probably one of the best tools in its category. It might not have all the feature Kubernetes has, but it also has less complexity. And it definitely has all the features a small company/team needs.

We chose Netlify for our website and knowledge base deployment, because it's easy, fast and simply awesome 🤩 We even use their deploy previews feature on our open source product to generate deploys for each pull request, to easily preview changes to the user interface.

When Redash was created 5 years ago we chose AngularJS as our frontend framework, but as AngularJS was replaced by Angular 2 we had to make a new choice. We decided that we won't migrate to Angular, but to either React or Vue.js. Eventually we decided to migrate to React for the following reasons:

1. Many in our community are already using React internally and will be able to contribute.
2. Using react2angular we can do the migration gradually over time instead of having to invest in a big rewrite while halting feature development.

So far the gradual strategy pays off and in the last 3 major releases we already shipped React code in the Angular.js application.