Software Development

Here are the tech stacks used by 9 Baltimore companies

We asked local companies about the programming languages and frameworks they rely on.

Code. (Video by YouTube user Steve Ehrlichmann, used under a Creative Commons license)

The uses and functions of the platforms and products that tech companies are creating generates lots of interest. But what are they technologies they’re using? The combination of tools, frameworks and programming languages that makes up a tech stack often varies based on what an organization needs or prefers.
So, as we were recently catching up with some leaders of realLIST startups and Super Meetup attendees we posed a question: What’s your tech stack?
Here’s how they responded:

Allovue

“At Allovue we use Rails and Ember to power the application, with PostgreSQL and Elastic Search for our data persistence layer. We also have some R and Clojure code in our ETL process along with a bunch of vanilla SQL,” said sales and marketing specialist Autumn Dorsey.

Arbit

“We use Elixir on the back-end and React for the front-end,” said CEO Alex Bullington.

b.well

From VP of Business Development Sheri Kitchin:
“b.well is at its core a Django Python stack sitting on top of a MySQL database feeing an Angular JS frontend hosted by AWS. We heavily leverage other technologies such as ElasticSearchDB, RabbitMQ, Celery, and MemCache on top of AWS specific tools such as Lambda, ElastiCache, RedShift, and more. We also have some smaller applications built in Node.js and React.”

CourseArc

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Redis/Memcached
  • Javascript
  • Node.js
  • React.js
  • MongoDB
  • GraphQL
  • Linux/Ubuntu
  • Nginx
  • AWS for infrastructure, including load balancing, auto-scaling, serverless tools, persistent storage via S3 and EFS
  • Bash
  • Node.js
  • Terraform
  • Packer
  • Ansible
  • Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring

Fearless

Pinkaloo

From Pinkaloo COO Daniel Gardner:
“At a high level we are using a Python framework for our Backend/API’s and React/ React Native on our Frontend, iOS and Android. We started on a MySQL database but run most of our charity data out of Dynamo and are migrating the rest there shortly. We leverage a number of AWS and other 3rd parties to help us stay lean on the DevOps side of things and have implemented Lambda functions wherever we can to create as much efficiency as possible.”
“We made the decision on Python since we are running a fintech platform and wanted something reliable and well documented. We made the decision on React because it offered us the most synergies across multiple frontend products.”

SmartLogic

From SmartLogic President Yair Flicker:
“For web applications, on the backend, we’ve been using Ruby on Rails since before its 1.0 release (for 12 years now). That said, with new applications, for the past 2-3 years now, we’ve been using Phoenix on Elixir. Rails is to Ruby what Phoenix is to Elixir (i.e. Rails is a framework built in Ruby as Phoenix is a framework built in Elixir). Elixir is functional — a different programming paradigm. Fun fact! Two of our developers are speaking at ElixirConf in September. ElixirConf is the largest and most established / well-known conference around Elixir.”
“For the frontend, we’ve been all react for several years now. reactJS has been winning the Javascript framework/library wars for years now. Fun fact! One of our former developers, Sam Goldman, now works at the Facebook building / supporting reactJS (he left us to go work for them, supporting react).”
“For mobile, we’ve been using React Native for a few years as well. It’s an abstraction layer allowing developers to write react / JS code, which gets compiled down to native iOS / Android code. For the types of apps we work on (i.e. not games) we can get ~90% of an app written in react / JS. And you surely know that JS is one of the most taught / used programming languages nowadays.”

Yet Analytics

From Milt Reder, VP of Engineering, Yet Analytics:
“Everything in our tech stack runs on AWS. On AWS we deploy our applications into containers, all of our applications are written in Clojure on the JVM, and Clojurescript for the browser and nodejs. We have a continuous integration flow, meaning that as our team is  writing code it is automatically tested and deployed. We use a variety of databases from postgres to Amazon DynamoDB to Datomic.”
“Clojure gives us the opportunity to write for a bunch of different environments with similar, or in many cases, the same, source code, making our dev team super efficient. Containers like Docker let us deploy easily and securely and AWS makes things not easy, but consistent and scalable. One of the things that we’re really excited about right now is AWS Lambda, which uses a serverless model, and we’ve deployed both Clojure and Clojurescript to it with great results.”

Zentail

From Pauline Shiu, Director of Marketing:
“Our tech stack was built around having the most flexibility and the best customer experience.
It’s built on PhP. It’s not a common language but enables flexibility and allowed us to build our own system that’s fit to our needs.
We also use:

  • PostgreSQL (flexible, stable, active community)
  • React makes it incredibly easy to keep data flowing to our webpages without needing to refresh.
  • Redis information is quickly access across accounts.
  • RabbitMQ enables us to move processing into queues and allows us to scale easily.
  • Nginx handles everything we need from a web server perspective.”
Companies: Pinkaloo / Allovue

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