Why Your Tech Stack Matters
At Bixly, our core tech stack has been well established for many years. We’ve been programming in Python/Django for well over 10 years and using Angular and React on the frontend for about half that time. Like with many businesses, that wasn’t always the case. In the early days of Bixly, we didn’t have the focus we have today and it took us some time to realize what our focus should be. In this episode of Tech Tuesday, Cris and Andrew, discuss the history of our tech stack, why we settled on Python, Angular, and React, and why we continue to have open discussions with our clients about the technology that powers their software.
Great advice for any company is to have a focus. Cris outlines how Bixly narrowed in on Python because we realized that while there were several overseas development houses serving clients, at the time there weren’t any here in the US. This meant that Bixly could offer a huge advantage to clients who wanted to work with software development teams in their own time zone. Early on, we used to manage additional offshore developers who worked US hours, but today we have an exclusively US based staff, nearly all of whom are located here in California. We have discovered over the years that having a team that works in the same time zone as our clients, taking meetings at convenient hours, communicating well, and being productive is a huge benefit to the success of the project.
As Bixly grew, we added Angular and React. As Andrew states, “They are both pretty mature technologies at this point. They have very wide adoption.” This allows us to do rapid JavaScript development and work in technologies that don’t pigeonhole our clients. We, of course, want our clients to work with us for as long as they need customer software development and support, but we also understand that they may need to bring their development in house or change teams. We want them to have the flexibility to do that. We want our clients to have a code base that will be usable for the long haul, with well supported and established technologies.
At the same time that it’s important to have a focus, it’s equally important to be able to be flexible. We also have the ability to work in Node and Vue as well as PHP. We’ve made native mobile applications for both iOS and Android. And we really love to work in Ionic to leverage JavaScript web-based technologies to develop for mobile. This is beneficial in so many ways: it allows us to leverage our expertise in web programming on mobile; Ionic is very powerful and works for a large majority of mobile apps; it keeps the code base coherent for customers who may be offering their technology on multiple platforms; it ultimately results in a huge cost savings for our clients. At the foundation of our love for Ionic is its ability to fulfill our priority to continue to create high-quality software even as an MVP, satisfying both business goals and technology aspirations.
As we work with our clients, we have a lot of questions because we want to fully understand your idea. Who is your user base?How will they be digesting this information? Does it make more sense for them to do it over a web browser or mobile app? There will even be some industry specific questions, for example if you want to build an app that is related to the medical industry or banking, security and compliance become a big priority. Ensuring that we are meeting industry standards is key!
Thank you for joining us for this first episode of Tech Tuesday. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. If you are ready to start talking about your custom software, we are ready to come alongside you to determine the best technology for your goals! Set up a FREE consultation today!
Originally published at https://blog.bixly.com on November 3, 2020.
