HTML5 vs PHP vs Python

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

This post is a bit of an obvious one, as we have a web application, we obviously need to have HTML and CSS in our stack. Though specifically though, we can talk a bit about backward compatibility and the specific approaches we want to enforce in our codebase.

HTML : Not much explanation here, you have to interact with HTML for a web app. We will stick to the latest standard: HTML 5.

CSS: Again if we want to style any of our components within he web, we have to use to style it. Though we will be taking advantage of JSS in our code base and try to minimize the # of CSS stylesheets and include all our styling within the components themselves. This leaves the codebase much cleaner and makes it easier to find styles!

Babel: We understand that not every browser is able to support the cool new features of the latest node/JS features (such as redue, filter, etc) seen in ES6. We will make sure to have the correct Babel configuration o make our application backward compatible.

Material UI (MUI): We need to make our user interface as intuitive and pretty as possible within his MVP, and the UI framework used by Google will provide us with exactly that. MUI provides pretty much all the UI components you would need and allows heavy customization as well. Its vast # of demos will allow us to add components quickly and not get too hung up on making UI components.

We will be using the latest version of create-react-app which bundles most of the above along many necessary frameworks (e.g. Jest for testing) to get started quickly.