JavaScript

Node.js is my choice because it uses very few resources to run and it is capable to handle tons of connections simultaneously. Most developers already know JavaScript, the evolution of ECMAScript is immediately reflected to Node.js and all you have to do is update your Server's Node.js version without time and effort. Thousands of improvements that makes it very powerful especially in asynchronous programming. The web is full of courses, dev communities, free sample code, plunkers and many knowledge sources on Node.js that facilitates the learning curve. What else we can ask from a legendary language that is still evolving? I am learning Node.js by developing a simple REST WebAPI and using it as a playground to test situations in which the main objective is to challenge Node.js and compare results and performance with .NET implementations and certain well known fast PHP implementations. Until now the results are astonishing. Summarizing: Node.js for backend is so far (in my opinion) the most recommended solution to get positive achievements in size, speed, power, concurrency, scalability, deployment and running costs.

We chose TypeScript at Codecov when undergoing a recent rewrite of a legacy front end. Our previous front end was a mishmash of vanilla JavaScript and CoffeeScript , and was expanded upon haphazardly as the need arose. Without a unifying set of paradigms and patterns, the CoffeeScript and JavaScript setup was proving hard to maintain and expand upon by an engineering team. During a move to Vue.js , we decided to also make the move to TypeScript. Integrating TypeScript and Vue.js is fairly well understood at this point, so the setup wasn't all that difficult, and we felt that the benefits of incorporating TypeScript would outweigh the required time to set it up and get our engineering team up to speed.

Choosing to add TypeScript has given us one more layer to rely on to help enforce code quality, good standards, and best practices within our engineering organization. One of the biggest benefits for us as an engineering team has been how well our IDEs and editors (e.g., Visual Studio Code ) integrate with and understand TypeScript . This allows developers to catch many more errors at development time instead of relying on run time. The end result is safer (from a type perspective) code and a more efficient coding experience that helps to catch and remove errors with less developer effort.

Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

I liked Sublime Text for its speed, simplicity and keyboard shortcuts which synergize well when working on scripting languages like Ruby and JavaScript. I extended the editor with custom Python scripts that improved keyboard navigability such as autofocusing the sidebar when no files are open, or changing tab closing behavior.

But customization can only get you so far, and there were little things that I still had to use the mouse for, such as scrolling, repositioning lines on the screen, selecting the line number of a failing test stack trace from a separate plugin pane, etc. After 3 years of wearily moving my arm and hand to perform the same repetitive tasks, I decided to switch to Vim for 3 reasons:

• your fingers literally don’t ever need to leave the keyboard home row (I had to remap the escape key though)
• it is a reliable tool that has been around for more than 30 years and will still be around for the next 30 years
• I wanted to "look like a hacker" by doing everything inside my terminal and by becoming a better Unix citizen

The learning curve is very steep and it took me a year to master it, but investing time to be truly comfortable with my #TextEditor was more than worth it. To me, Vim comes close to being the perfect editor and I probably won’t need to switch ever again. It feels good to ignore new editors that come out every few years, like Atom and Visual Studio Code.

When we rebooted our front-end stack earlier this year, we wanted to have a consolidated and friendly developer experience. Up to that point we were using Sass and BEM. There was a mix of HAML views, React components and Angular. Since our ongoing development was going to be exclusively in React, we wanted to shift to an inline styling library so the "wall of classnames" could be eliminated. The ever-shifting landscape of inline CSS libraries for React is sometimes difficult to navigate.

We decided to go with Glamorous for a few reasons:

1) Previous team experience with this library 2) We can write our styles in plain JavaScript (which brings many benefits) 3) It supports server-side rendering 4) It has great composition patterns

As you may or may not know, Glamorous has ceased active development and been mostly superseded by Emotion. We are planning to migrate to either Emotion or @styled-components in the near future, and I'll write another Stack Decision when we get there!

#inlinecss

Britecharts was created from the point of view of just using it as a JavaScript-agnostic library. That worked really well with our Backbone.js builds. We just use a render and initialize all the stuff there.

Now moving into React, we have the necessity of actually moving Britecharts into React land. That's something we're gonna start working on. That is a wrapper of our Britecharts in order to be used with React. And we are really excited about that.

Stitch is run entirely on AWS. All of our transactional databases are run with Amazon RDS, and we rely on Amazon S3 for data persistence in various stages of our pipeline. Our product integrates with Amazon Redshift as a data destination, and we also use Redshift as an internal data warehouse (powered by Stitch, of course).

The majority of our services run on stateless Amazon EC2 instances that are managed by AWS OpsWorks. We recently introduced Kubernetes into our infrastructure to run the scheduled jobs that execute Singer code to extract data from various sources. Although we tend to be wary of shiny new toys, Kubernetes has proven to be a good fit for this problem, and its stability, strong community and helpful tooling have made it easy for us to incorporate into our operations.

While we continue to be happy with Clojure for our internal services, we felt that its relatively narrow adoption could impede Singer's growth. We chose Python both because it is well suited to the task, and it seems to have reached critical mass among data engineers. All that being said, the Singer spec is language agnostic, and integrations and libraries have been developed in JavaScript, Go, and Clojure.

Stitch’s frontend is used to configure data sources and destinations and monitor the status of each. Although we have been using AngularJS since its early days, we recently introduced React components into our front end, which many of our developers find easier to work with. We started using CoffeeScript when it was one of the few options for a more expressive alternative to vanilla JavaScript, but today we opt to instead write new code in ES6, which we feel is a more mature alternative.

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

The client-side stack of Shopify Admin has been a long journey. It started with HTML templates, jQuery and Prototype. We moved to Batman.js, our in-house Single-Page-Application framework (SPA), in 2013. Then, we re-evaluated our approach and moved back to statically rendered HTML and vanilla JavaScript. As the front-end ecosystem matured, we felt that it was time to rethink our approach again. Last year, we started working on moving Shopify Admin to React and TypeScript.

Many things have changed since the days of jQuery and Batman. JavaScript execution is much faster. We can easily render our apps on the server to do less work on the client, and the resources and tooling for developers are substantially better with React than we ever had with Batman.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages