FlowMingle is composed of a lot of moving parts, which we try to farm out as much as possible.  It’s my sincere belief that the days of hosting your own web app are dead and are rapidly being buried—I am having a hard time conceiving of a scenario which requires dedicated, owned hardware in a rack that’s physically accessible.  So here’s what we’re using to get the job done, and you’ll sense a theme: minimum hassle.  We don’t have much time to worry about the incidentals, so we go with what’s easy; whatever gives us the most bang for the least money, work, and irritation.

SliceHost

We’ve been slicers from day one, and have yet to have problem #1 (even when I’ve forgotten to pay the bills).  Slicehost hosts our web, mail, and database servers courtesy of Ubuntu 8.04.  We want bigger slices, they grow.  Smaller, they scale.  All through an effortless interface, and at resonable rates.  We host at least one Ubuntu server there at any given time, and it covers our needs with some change to spare.  When we need more, I have no doubt SliceHost would be happy for more of our business.

Amazon S3

The greats say content delivery is key, and we agree.  Our images are served via Amazon S3, and if CloudFront had reasonable image versioning and cache proposition, we’d be using that as well.  The aws-s3 gem syncs whenever we deploy, so management is non-existant. We maintain separate buckets for development, staging, and production.  When we need to access things directly, or set up new stuff, our tool of choice is Transmit.  Mostly the CDN is for the benefit or our users’ photos and images, but it’s nice to have the 128K worth of media making up our home page just as fast.

Google Analytics

Sure, but it works for us.  We’ve looked at GetClicky, and a few other solutions, but there are problems with each.  The most reliable, if not the most up-to-the-minute is still Google Analytics. At some future date, we’ll be doing more detailed analytics, but for now this cuts the mustard.

Basecamp

One of the toughest things about a startup is keeping everyone on-task and on-message.  The tighter the message, the greater the tendency to want to add to it.  One solution is keeping a solid task list.  Historically, we used Trac for much of this, but we signed on to Basecamp about a year ago.  Straigtforward, easy to use, and no-nonsense.  We probably use the to-do lists feature more than anything else, though we collectively compose docs on the Whiteboard.

Github

I know, right?  Git has simplified our lives significantly.  Github imported all of our old repos without a burp.  It gets the nod.

Integrity

Possibly the most hassle of anything so far, but not so much because its fundamentally incorrect, but our code wasn’t geared toward continuous integration.  Integrity’s setup was almost dirt-simple, but digging around for answers is time-consuming.  I can forsee a time in the near future when we’re going to need a little more than integrity provides.

That’s the setup.  How do we actually develop?

RubyOnRails

Given the choices, it fit the best.  Wide user base, easy answers, lots of people working to solve its problems.  Plenty of plugins to make our lives easy.  Go.  We deploy on nginx and thin, and host data via mysql. There are a blue million plugins we take advantage of, but in the words of Alton Brown, that’s another show.

TextMate, vi

There simply are not enough good things to say about TextMate.  While not presenting full IDE capabilities (at least, not without several bundles) it gets the job done admirably.  I use vi quite a bit for quick edits, or remote edits, but the lion’s share of programming work takes place in TM.

CssEdit, Photoshop, and Fireworks

While CSSEdit isn’t strictly a graphics application, it’s invaluable in getting the CSS right.  Photoshop (Phil’s tool of choice) and Fireworks (mine) get a lot of use in image composition.

Firebug

I don’t think we would live without Firebug.

That’s it.  If there are questions, direct them to the usual places.