Technologies Behind Type.
June 16, 2017I wrote how long it took me to build Type a few weeks back. Here are some of the technologies I used for it.
Hosting
Heroku. Maybe I should step into the light and move to AWS, but that seemed like something I wasn’t quite ready for. Heroku serves my purpose for now and if Type ever blew up, then I would have to adjust then. That’s a good problem to have.
Backend
Rails. I knew this would be the fastest for me to get set up and that I would have the fewest headaches. I first used Rails briefly in 2008, and then came back to it during my early time at Fullscreen. Then, while helping out with EasyPaint, we’re using Grape on the backend, so there was some more Ruby. It is my most familiar server-side lanaguage and framework, so I ran with it. Some gems I used include:
- sass-rails
- coffee-rails
- jquery-rails
- bitfields
- devise
- omniauth (for Facebook and Twitter)
- fb_graph2
- active_model_serializers
- ngannotate-rails
- font-awesome-rails
Database
Postgres. Mostly because it seems like the go-to for Rails, and I had experience with it both for Fullscreen and EasyPaint.
Frontend
Angular. I may not be a cool React kid, and I’m still not on Angular 2. I know, oof. This was where I wanted to get something done quickly and I knew I could do it this way. I also did it in CoffeeScript because that’s what I had been using most recently. I used my own library, toolbelt, and ng-fastclick put together by an old coworker, Paul Sweeney.
Android
Java. I’ll probably move to Kotlin because it’s the new hotness. Ultimately the app is straightforward, so I didn’t even need to use Retrofit. I did use a few libraries though even though I probably didn’t need to.
iOS
Swift. This was where my biggest learning experience happened. It was my first foray into any iOS work. Swift feels a lot like Kotlin, though I wonder how hard it would be to switch back and forth. Some cocoapods used are:
Looking at all of these makes me realize I definitely have some version updates to do.
