Francesco Boffa

I don't think I have registered a domain in the last 10 years that hasn't been linked to CloudFlare within the first 2 hours from registration.

The benefits you get from even the free version of CloudFlare are amazing. From day 0: - 30/80% of bandwidth savings thanks to their CDN - Origin IP address protection - Managed SSL

We are heavy Rails users. As such, whenever possible, we try to use plain javascript, HTML views, and tons of partials.

However, our menu interface required high levels of interactivity, tons of moving parts and a complex state.

There is absolutely no way we could have built what we have without a good UI framework.

I had worked with an old version of Angular and I still get shivers any time I recall that jig. Ultimately we preferred React over Vue, Preact and any other framework for a simple reason: maintenance.

Being backed by a mega corporation like Facebook, we know that problems will be fixed, performances will keep improving and that while best practices will shift, our codebase will ultimately benefit from that change.

At the time our needs are not too advanced: - we have to send SMS to inform customers that their food is on their way - we have to send SMS to verify telephone numbers from our own clients - we want an international service, with a good API and custom Sender ID. - we need to receive webhooks to manage delivery failures

Twilio excels at all of the above. It is definitely the Stripe of telephony.

After the initial investigation on which platform to use to process our payments, Stripe was a total no brainer.

We are heavy users of Stripe Connect, which allows us to collect payments on behalf of our client restaurants. Connect makes it super easy to collect, payout and manage any fee structure.

At the time that the platform was written it was also the only platform that was working flawlessly with Google Pay and Apple Pay on the Web.

Today we also give out to our clients Terminals from Stripe, allowing us to process all payments under a single unified interface.

We are looking forward to further integrations, like with AliPay and other local payment methods.

After only a few months of work, it become clear that keeping our development machines in sync with the production servers was going to be a non trivial effort.

Docker guarantees that our development environment is exactly the same as the production one, minus environment variables.