SES has native Laravel integration, was easy to set up and there's a large free quota. For simply sending emails, it was an obvious choice as we already use the AWS ecosystem for other parts of the Whyp project.
The Whyp transcoders are written in C# for reliabilty, speed and ease of distribution. C# is a beautiful language but slower to develop with than other languages/frameworks which is why we don't use it for the API yet.
We use S3 to store user data as it's reliable, failsafe and affordable. It's also part of the AWS ecosystem that we are already using for other parts of the project.
VSCode is a great IDE for Vue.js development. It's free, fast, easy to extend and customise, and has settings sync built in which is useful for those of us who often change machines while working.
