What is a tech stack you ask? Good question - but if you clicked this article you probably already know the answer.
(Don’t worry, I won’t make you scroll past 5 paragraphs about the origins of the word “tech stack.” Let’s get to it.)
If you're a dev—or just curious about what powers Evergrace—here’s a peek behind the curtain.
I'm a TypeScript engineer by trade, and I coded pretty much everything that powers the Evergrace platform.
Here's some high level details of our tech stack.
The Evergrace mobile app is built in React Native which means I write the entire application in TypeScript and React Native compiles native iOS (Swift) and Android (Java) applications for me to publish into the app stores.
We heavily rely on open source react native packages, and a few paid ones too.
I’ve specialised my career in TypeScript, so without React Native I’d be stuck writing Swift or Kotlin. No thanks.
We run a Node.js web service to handle API calls from the App and Website for things like:
Logging playback statistics
Signing up to our email newsletter
Logging in to Evergrace accounts
The API is hosted on an Ubuntu instance in New York on Google Cloud.
It's all fairly simple at the moment. We don't have a load balancer or any fancy security in place. We can't scale quickly, and we aren't using serverless. It's all a work in progress, the TODO list is massive, but we are chipping away at it. Laying robust technological foundations takes time.
Our current needs are simple. I deploy everything from my MacBook Pro using the command line and some bash utils I've written. It gets the job done at speed that is proficient for me.
Our website is built in the epic CMS framework called Statamic. Seriously, this is the best CMS.
We use the privacy focused Fathom analytics for simple web stats.
For styling, Tailwind CSS, which makes building UI components so quick, easy and consistent.
The whole site is compiled to static html/css/js files using SSG and deployed to our CDN provider.
All our assets, for both the website and app, are hosted with Firebase Hosting service. Everything from story MP3 files, JSON configurations, artwork and imagery, and of course the website files goes up here.
The Firebase CDN is the best and easiest way I've found to deploy static content. The Google CDN that Firebase uses is incredibly fast, with more regions and lower latency around the globe than anything else I've compared. I'm not usually keen on supporting the big ad-tech companies but test it for yourself and you'll see it perform.
The stack I've chosen for Evergrace is all the technologies I love and believe are best in class. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be doing it my way - no legacy code or tech debt from "the last guy" - just clean, purposeful code I believe in.
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