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Andrew Gibson
Andrew Gibson

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How Our Stack Evolved in 10 Years

One of the perks of working in the same place for the last 10 years is that I got to see how our stack evolved.

Technologies 2010 2020
Frontend HTML
CSS
JavaScript
jQuery
HTML5
Sass
ReactJS
Gatsby
Backend Apache 2.0
PHP 5.3
MySQL 5.1
Nginx
Node.js
MongoDB
Infrastructure Servers in our office Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Services
Automated Testing Selenium WebDriver Endtest
Analytics Google Analytics FullStory
Amplitude
Segment

In the spotlight:

1. Gatsby ❤️

Gatsby renders your React views to static HTML files that get sent to the client, making the site usable even with JavaScript disabled.

This means that the client does not have to do the heavy lifting of building the site with JavaScript.

This improves SEO and performance, since the site can be rendered much faster on initial load.

2. Endtest ❤️

Endtest allows us to create automated tests in a few minutes and execute them on their cross-browser cloud, without even having to write any code.

It enables us to execute tests on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer and mobile browsers.

We have a set of regression tests which are running multiple times each day, giving us the confidence that we're the first ones to find out when something breaks.

3. FullStory ❤️

FullStory records the sessions of our users and allows us to see the replays.

This helps us in discovering potential UX issues before they cost us.

There has been a constant debate if using session recorders is ethical.

We do show it in our list of Subprocessors.

Final thoughts

The overall trend has evolved towards lifting some of the weight off our shoulders.

What about your stack? How has it changed over time?

Top comments (20)

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martinrojas profile image
martin rojas • Edited

Hadn't heard of endtest will have to take a look.

However in the front end I think JavaScript should also be on the 2020 side(or ES6). Unless you are doing Typescript. Mostly for more Junior developer it seems to them that react as the language and like in the old days people said they coded in jQuery

 
vicradon profile image
Osinachi Chukwujama

He is referring to his company's stack.

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ameedjamous profile image
Ameed Jamous

how did NGINX replace PHP, did not get this part ?

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andrewkeyboardwarrior profile image
Andrew Gibson

NGINX replaced Apache.
Node.js replaced PHP.
Sorry for the confusion.

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ameedjamous profile image
Ameed Jamous

Makes more sense now 👍

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bmstschneider profile image
bm-stschneider

First things first, who is 'our'?
Second why NGINX and not express or something, what benefits does NGINX has over nodejs web servers?

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insuusvenerati profile image
Sean

Nginx is considered a Web Server and Express is considered a Web Application Framework. It's apples to apples I think.

If you want to develop an API, Nginx would not be your first choice. If you wanted to serve a static website, Nginx might be your first choice.

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helloitsm3 profile image
Sean

Is Nginx the go-to when trying to scale your web server?

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andrewkeyboardwarrior profile image
Andrew Gibson

We're a mid-size company who develops digital solutions for the Banking and Financial industries.
Regarding NGINX, from what I remember, we wanted to work with Node.js and we did some research and NGINX was the most popular option for Node.js back then.
If you have any arguments that would suggest a different option is better, I would love to hear them.
I'm always open to such discussions.

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bolt04 profile image
David Pereira

I would say Android development has been changing from Java to Kotlin. Also back-end development since we already have support for Kotlin in the Spring framework

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andrewkeyboardwarrior profile image
Andrew Gibson

Interesting. Thank you for your reply.
Personally, I'm not familiar with Android, I thought that it wasn't possible with anything else besides Java.
Glad I learned something new.

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aliadnani profile image
aliadnan

Pretty cool! What made you guys switch from SQL to NoSQL MongoDB?

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1e4_ profile image
Ian

Out of the whole article this was the change I was most shocked at. Cue 5 years from now when they realize Mongo isn't what they expect

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milanfaltus profile image
Milan Faltus

Why did you chose Gatsby over Next.js?

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andrewkeyboardwarrior profile image
Andrew Gibson

Several reasons, but mostly because we wanted to generate the HTML/CSS/JS at build time.

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jozsefsallai profile image
József Sallai

Next.js can do that too now.

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sproket profile image
sproket

It looks garbage start to finish.

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aniganesh profile image
Aniganesh

Gatsby renders your React views to static HTML files that get sent to the client, making the site usable even with JavaScript disabled.

Is that what server side rendering is?

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plong0 profile image
Pat Long

Gatsby is traditionally a "static site generator" (SSG), it's a bit different than "server side rendering" (SSR), although in the newest versions of Gatsby (4+) they have added SSR and even a new "Deferred Static Generation" (DSG) publishing type.

SSR is about on-demand rendering, so the first time the page is requested it gets rendered server-side and caches the rendered copy for a faster delivery on subsequent requests.

SSG everything is generated at build time, so even the first request for a page is ultra fast.

One appeal of SSR over SSG is that it allows pages to be more dynamic and update more frequently.

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pomfrit123 profile image
***

How is FullStory helpfull, what issues can it find?

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