Judith Malnick

Kong is built on OpenResty because it allows us to extend nginx with Lua scripts through the ngx_lua module. OpenResty bundles this module as well as many others, providing a powerful server for developers to extend.

We could have built a modular reverse proxy on nginx either by bundling Nginx with our own flavor of 3rd party modules or by developing on top of OpenResty. We admired the work done on OpenResty and thought of a way to build a modulable core, on which plugins could be added. Hence, Kong is mostly a collection of Lua scripts that allow it to execute plugins at runtime for routes and services.

This decision is an adaptation of a Quora answer originally written by Thibault Charbonnier.

On the marketing team at Kong, we use Trello for tracking our tasks. Other teams use JIRA but we don't need to do any storypoint estimation and don't really operate in sprints, so we find it to be a bit of overkill. Trello has easy-to-configure integrations with most of the tools we use, and a great mobile app which makes it easy to add things to to-do lists even when we aren't in front of our computers. If there's one thing I would add to Trello it would be some kind of time tracking to help us stay focused and to be able to look back on tasks and see how long each one took. It would also be nice if there were an epic equivalent so that we could group cards into projects, but this can sort of be hacked around using lables. Over all we're pretty happy with Trello! Would recommend!