Startups Using Heroku in Boston

Ruby on Rails – We use Ruby on Rails because of its maturity and large ecosystem. On the front-end we use jQuery and Bootstrap, and on the backend we use ActiveRecord and Sequel to access Postgres databases.

Sidekiq and Redis – for distributed job processing capabilities.

RSpec – While not dogmatic about test-first development in all cases, we are passionate about writing and maintaining thoughtful and robust test coverage in RSpec.

Heroku and AWS – Heroku hosts our applications, managed databases, and various services such as centralized logging and distributed batch job processing. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides file storage and simple messaging capabilities.

Bamboo – We implement continuous integration and delivery (CI / CD) via Atlassian Bamboo, deploying to production environments multiple times per day.

React.js – We use both React and Vue for our front end work. We’ve been quite happy with React but are even happier with Vue for it’s flexibility and because it’s model is more familiar.

PostgreSQL – We use Postgres as our database. Postgres is most attractive for us do to it’s strict SQL compliance as well as for Postgis, which we will be using for some of our product. We’re also using the Postgres JSON functionality for some portions of our application which are not easily modeled using a relational database.

Python – Our backend is written entirely in Python, which we find to be highly productive and elegant. We use Django as our backend framework. We get a lot of value from the ORM as well as from Django REST framework – and from the Django admin.

Draft.js & React – We recently rebuilt our text editor from the ground up on top of Draft.js. Building on Draft.js lets us create a smooth, rich editing experience that gets out of the user’s way so they can focus on sharing great content with their team. We also use Babel and Webpack to transpile and bundle up our front-end assets.

Slack – Tettra is built on top of the Slack platform. We use Slack for login and authentication and have built in notifications and slash commands. Our CEO even wrote an article about it.

PHP/Laravel – Our web application is built on the PHP web framework Laravel. Laravel comes with a ton of great building blocks including an ORM, queuing system, templating framework, and a prebuilt Vagrant box (VM) for local development to get us up and running and keep iterating quickly.

GitHub/Travis/Heroku – We use a combination of GitHub, Travis and Heroku for our continuous integration/deployment process. All pull requests get code-reviewed by a team member and have tests run automatically. Once code is merged to master, Travis runs the build and deploys to our staging environment on Heroku. We use the Heroku pipeline feature to promote staging code to production.

Intercom – At Tettra, everyone talks to customers. We use Intercom to get user feedback directly in the app, resolve bugs and inform our product process every day.