The dev.to tech stack

Here's our stack:

Open Source

• Ruby on Rails
• Mostly VanillaJS with PreactJs for some components
• Postgres (hosted on Heroku)

Infra/Services

• Heroku
• Fastly
• Airbrake
• Skylight
• Sendgrid
• Amazon S3
• Google Analytics
• Stream
• Algolia
• Algorithmia
• Timber
• Codeship
• Codeclimate
• GitHub
• Pusher
• Twilio Video
• DaCast

Sometimes it's hard to say where to delineate the line of services that are part of the "stack" vs ones that are more just part of the business, but this is a list of tech we use that seems to fit the "stack" bill. I've also omitted a couple services that we have integrated but don't actively use at the moment. I've also omitted some stuff that seems to just be part of the Heroku default bundle. I also might have forgotten about something.

Anyway, feel free to ask us anything about what we use.

Comments

[kichu-kishore]

How do you manage SEO without any framework like next js...

[Arpit]

Interesting :)

[Chris Brocklesby]

Hi @ben ,
Is this blog post still valid, is this still the stack you guys use ?

Do you use Heroku to host your Ruby on Rail or just Postgres (If you don't use Heroku for the backend host, who do you use) ?

Really interested, Many Thanks,
Chris.

[Yann]

Is this description of the tech stack still up to date?

The site feels so snappy that I was excepting some convoluted and esoteric tech stack from the future.
Great work.

[Ben Halpern]

Not totally up to date, but not a lot has changed.

[Wayan Jimmy]

are you using preact ? found dev.to logo here

preactjs.com/about/we-are-using

[Jesse M. Holmes]

Second bullet under Open Source.

[temon]

how do you handle the user feeds? it's pretty fast...
are you only using getstream.io for handling that?

thanks...

[Matteo Joliveau]

Hi @ben , I have a few questions.
Is your frontend template based (Embedded Ruby and alike), a single page application (React or such) or a server-side rendered SPA?

[auct]

Do you use some caching for sql requests? Or everything is hitting sql db?

[auct]

Why heroku?
Much cheaper is to get some random vps, isn't it?

[Amit Merchant]

What's your revenue model for dev.to ?

[Swanand]

Love that the stack is so simple.

Check out what Built With reveals about you: builtwith.com/dev.to

[Dwi purnomo]

i'm interested to build a SaaS like getstream. for now i want to build for notification system. is dev.to notification system use getstream?

[Ben Halpern]

🙌

[Justin L Beall]

I saw yesterday when I wrote a blog-post that you guys use S3 as storage for attachment uploads. Do you have any software that either scrubs or prevents malicious files from being uploaded?

[Ben Halpern]

Images are processed and served by the Cloudinary CDN. S3 is only for storing and passing on to the CDN, not serving to users.

[rhymes]

A few questions:

• what do you use Algorithmia for?
• any thoughts on Timber vs Papertrail? I see you don't use any of the logging addons on Heroku

Didn't know about Skylight, I'll check it out.

ps. you should submit the stack to Stackshare.io :-)

[Ben Halpern]

Algorithmia's a convenience service we can reach for when we need a pure function to process some data. Can be used to easily run some ML on a block of text, perhaps to pull out keywords. One simple use case is to determine the "background color" of a post's cover image before it loads. It's nice to have it be based on the palette of the incoming image. I looked for a Ruby gem to do this, couldn't find one that worked well, so plugged in an Algorithmia function and it worked like a charm.

We know the founders of Timber and like it in concept. It's pretty new but I think it makes logging just a bit more powerful.

Big fan of Skylight so far. And @vaidehijoshi works on it so it must be good. 😊

[peckjon]

Glad to hear we're being of service @ben ! We pride ourselves in being an easy drop-in way to add language- and framework-agnostic machine learning to any app, and love to hear about uses like this :-)

BTW we just published a new post about SyntaxNet -- way more advanced than just keyword extraction, thought you might find it useful: blog.algorithmia.com/advanced-gram...

Keep rockin' it!

[rhymes]

Thanks for the reply, very interesting!

I will check them out in the following days!

[Vaidehi Joshi]

@rhymes You should definitely check out Skylight if you're looking for accessible performance monitoring tools on a Rails app. We also have a free 30-day trial, so you can always try it out and see how it works for you. And we're always around to help you in case you have any issues getting set up!

@ben 💞

[rhymes]

Thank you! I'll definitely check it out in the following days.

We've been using NewRelic but sometimes I feel like I don't have the finger on the pulse, so to speak.