6 Powerful Technologies to Build and Maintain Your Website Like A Tech Giant
These tools were designed and developed by the world’s best software engineers to solve critical problems.
Technology is rapidly evolving, and the pace is only accelerating. New frameworks, libraries, and tools come and go, but here is a list of essentials, built to solve critical problems by the world’s best software engineers, that your tech team should actively be utilizing in order to operate your web agency like a tech giant. Including examples of service providers, use-cases, benefits, and information about how we use these tools to empower other web agency clients.
Git Version Control
Probably the most important aspect of any software development. Git allows you to save time and headaches by committing code into repositories so that code can be branched, forked, committed, merged, squashed, reviewed and generally well-maintained.
Without Git, you’ll likely end up with spaghetti code and bugs that are difficult to track and fix. Git allows developers from all over the world to contribute their time and coding skills to make progress with widely-used software you use every day.
Notable Companies and Brands Using Git
Companies such as Airbnb, Netflix, Medium , Reddit, Shopify, Lyft, and WordPress depend on Git for version controlling their software development. Git is so ubiquitous that a full list would be exhaustive.
Git Service Providers
GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket are a few of the services that provides these version control tools for individuals and teams all over the world.
How We Use Git
Git is at the core of how we build our software and web applications. Everything is built using Git so that our developers can easily manage code, build new features, and collaborate.
REST API and GraphQL
RESTful applications are the backbone of modern website and app development. REST APIs allow for instant communication between web services and micro services such as posting to social media or fetching the latest photos from a trending hashtag.
GraphQL is a powerful query language for REST APIs. It works by allowing you to fetch data in exactly the format that you need. Our web applications are fundamentally built with these technologies for tasks such as fetching content data to render on a web page or for deploying a new application.
REST API and GraphQL Service Providers
Zapier, Automate.io, IFTTT, Tray.io, and n8n.io are a few API and webhook services that allow you to quickly and easily connect different services together with many built-in integrations. Gatsby, LoopBack, Apollo, Prisma, Hasura, and Graphene are a few tools that integrate GraphQL to provide front-end and back-end services.
Notable Companies and Brands Using REST API and GraphQL
Facebook, Instagram, Medium, Twitter, Microsoft, Yelp, Intuit, The New York Times, Shopify, and Product Hunt are a few of the companies and brands that use REST APIs and GraphQL to provide seamless communication between their databases and services.
How We Use REST API and GraphQL
Our development infrastructure depends on REST API for communication between front-end and back-end services, as well as GraphQL to streamline the process. This is especially useful with our headless CMS which stores our content and data as machine-readable API data that is then delivered to the front-end and rendered on screen for users. This way our content and data is always decoupled from front-end and back-end code.
Additionally, our websites and applications can communicate with any other third-party APIs such as project management services, data analytics software, and machine learning tools.
Benefits:
- Speed & Performance: Sending and receiving API data is nearly instantaneous for most websites and application use-cases.
- Reliability: Transmitting data in exactly the format you need means little chance for communication hiccups.
- Security: Tokens and authorizations ensure that only authorized users and services may query and mutate data.
Headless CMS
Content management systems are extremely useful for publishing content online with little-to-no coding. By far the most popular CMS is WordPress which powers millions of websites and blogs. Unfortunately, WordPress is bloated and deeply coupled with its back-end MYSQL database system. If there is a critical issue with your theme, plugins, or database, this can render your entire system unstable or unusable.
The future of content management is Headless CMS. With this method, your content management system is completely decoupled from your database and your codebase. It can run independently and agnostic of any front-end and back-end system. Hosting, maintaining, and migrating data is a much easier this way because it eliminates the decency on other systems. If you need to update or upgrade your front-end or back-end, your CMS can remain as it is.
Notable Companies and Brands Using Headless CMS
Brands such as Disney, Google, Electronic Arts, Audible, Sticker Mule, Levi’s, Ebay, Ford, Discovery Inc., and many more use headless CMS to manage content which is then delivered to their users.
“GraphCMS provides an easy to use tool to help manage and highlight news stories related to Project C.A.T. The platform integrates seamlessly with our website and we are able to upload and distribute stories globally very quickly.”
-Matthew Falco, Manager at Social Good at Discovery Communications
Headless CMS Providers
Contentful, GraphCMS, Kinetico Kontent, and Prismic are a few of the most prominent headless CMS providers currently in the marketplace. They allow users to upload content data into their headless CMS platforms which the content can then be delivered to various front-end applications on desktop, mobile, or wherever.
How we use Headless CMS
Stability, performance, and usability is very important to our clients, that’s why we employ Headless CMS for all our websites and applications. All of our clients, applications, pages, components, contents including text, media, icons, layouts, buttons, backgrounds and more all stored as machine-readable API data and instantly delivered to users when they visit our pages. As our websites and applications evolve over time, our headless CMS remains stable and reliable as it is decoupled from front-end and back-end systems.
Benefits:
- Speed & Performance: Instant communication between front-end and back-end systems.
- Stability & Reliability: Decoupled from front-end and back-end systems.
- Usability: Headless CMS functions as easily as any other popular CMS such as WordPress and Squarespace. The decoupled nature means the interface is not cluttered by a plethora of settings, plugins, and other potentially bloated features.
Serverless Hosting and Deployments
A great modern tool for managing websites and applications is Serverless frameworks. Yes, there are still servers involved, however Serverless means the process of hosting and deploying is abstracted to eliminate administration overhead, provide automatic scaling, load balancing, and reduce operating costs so that you only pay for what you use. This makes it far easier to go from idea to production with significantly less DevOps resources.
With Serverless, websites and applications are hosted statically however do not be fooled, content and data can still be dynamically driven.
Once deployed, Serverless is typically accompanied by content delivery networks, ensuring automatic distribution, scaling, and balancing so that your users always get access to content and data as quickly as possible.
Continuous Integration and Automated Testing
Serverless deployments can also be integrated with automated testing and performance tools so that you can be sure that your application will run as intended for your users.
Notable Companies and Brands Using Serverless Framework
Companies such as Twilio, Lenovo, 9GAG, Twitch, Square and many others depend on serverless to provide them with the hosting and deployment solutions that they need.
Serverless Providers
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Cloudflare, and Vercel are some of the biggest serverless names. Most websites and apps that you use everyday are deployed, hosted, and served by these providers. Of course, there are many more available.
How We Use Serverless
Due to how incredibly useful Serverless is, all of our websites and applications are deployed and hosted using the Serverless framework. This helps to increase up-time and efficiency, eliminate redundancies, and reduce overhead.
Benefits:
- Speed & Performance: Deploying to Serverless environments is fast and easy. There is no need to setup and provision a new virtual environment. Most simple websites and applications will build and deploy in less than one minute.
- Redundancy & Reliability: Service providers are hyper-focused on optimizing the entire deployment and hosting process with built-in scalability, redundancy, and contingency that works agnostically across multiple cloud providers.
- Security: The lack of one central server or IP address means there is less risk to important data and source code. Most service providers have ways to deal with DDoS attacks which is generally not something a person other than a network administrator wishes to spend valuable time dealing with.
Content Delivery Networks
Users expect fast, snappy user experiences. Delivering content and data instantly is nothing less than an expectation. Companies such as Walmart and Amazon have discovered that long page times are directly correlated with loss in revenue. The affects of long loading times are tangible.
Fortunately, content delivery networks help to keep loading times low by delivering content and data to users through a nearby server, hopefully within a few miles, as opposed to a server thousands of miles away.
Notable Companies and Brands Using CDNs
Netflix is a key example of how a tech company built their own content delivery network to deliver gigabytes of data to millions of people around the world. Which they have now migrated over to Amazon Web Services as their cloud provider to increase service availability and significantly reduce costs.
Many other businesses have transitioned to utilizing CDN as their content delivery solution. The upsides are a significant case for increasing profit margins.
How We Use Content Delivery Networks
We deploy and host all our client websites serverlessly which then utilize content delivery networks to host and deliver content. After initial configuration, we don’t have to think about deployments and content delivery when maintaining client applications very much. For our team, the way we have built our development infrastructure, it’s as easy as new-client-app deploy and in less than one minute the client application is live on the web.
Benefits
- Speed & Performance: Content and data is delivered to users from nearby servers for near instant content delivery.
- Reliability & Redundancy: CDNs do all the load balance work so you don’t have to monitor traffic and manage delivery as traffic evolves.
- Security: CDNs act as a reverse proxy so that attackers cannot gain direct access to your servers. Your websites or applications are no longer served from one central, vulnerable source.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI and ML are powerful tools that can solve many types of problems and provide valuable results when done right. These tools allow computers to learn and understand complex, multi-dimensional problems to achieve solutions in much the same way our human brains work; by using neurons to construct neural pathways which unlock high level and low level understanding of complex phenomena.
Notable Companies and Brands Using AI and ML
Google famously uses many machine learning algorithms to build it’s understanding of the world wide web in order to provide superior search results against its competitors. Their success has earned them a dominating 88% market share among internet search engines.
Amazon also uses machine learning to recommend new products to its customers, as well as for coordinating transportation logistics for package delivery.
Netflix employs the use of ML in order to provide new movie recommendations for its customers from within the user interface. Their recommendation engine uses data such as movie genre, cast, and ratings in order to discover movies that you are most likely to enjoy watching.
Tesla uses a type of machine learning called “computer vision” which is a method that allows a computer to use visual data from camera sensors to learn and understand how to drive safely and efficiently. Tesla hopes to eliminate the need for human drivers in order to improve safety and the overall quality of life for its passengers.
AI and ML Frameworks and Service Providers
Google Tensorflow, Algorithmia, Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, BigML, PyTorch, and Keras are a few of the frameworks and service providers that provide AI and ML capabilities for commercial application.
How We Use AI and ML
Our web framework fundamentally uses machine-readable structured data to store and retrieve content from APIs and databases delivered to our front-end interfaces. This allows us to run deep learning algorithms to simulate users navigating thousands of pages in order to achieve optimized page results, targeted messaging, user-friendly interface design, and more.
In addition to using deep learning for page optimization, we are actively building a solution for server-side ML data compression and client-side ML photo and video upscaling in order to reduce payload size, improve the user experience, and lower server overhead.
Benefits
- Speed & Performance: AI and ML allows you to build solutions and achieve results that would otherwise take thousands of human lifetimes.
- Scalability: As stated above, AI and ML-driven results allow individuals to have access to higher-level understanding of complex phenomenon reduced to trivial levels that are then actionable by humans.
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