The tools that made us

How does Lean-Coders work?

We use many products/tools and workflows in our daily business. Today we will showcase some of them in the hope it may help others as well.

All processes/tools we use were chosen based on our current member amount, financial situation and also our technical skills and willingness to customize.

1. Database

We love JavaScript therefore we also love JSON and so it was pretty easy for us to decide which Database to use. MongoDB. At first, we launched our own instance in a docker container. After a while it felt a little bit stressful to administrate everything on our own, but thankfully MongoDB Cloud Atlas already had everything in place for us. MongoDB enables enormous speed and simple data modeling. Atlas gives us easy Security Setup and great Backup Features. The high quality of statistics and its alert system are an additional benefit and justify the high price.

2. Logging

Kibana/ELK Stack is already the enterprise standard. We searched for a hosted solution and Sematext was the best fit for us. The pricing and alert system was really easy to setup, especially with the Kubernetes config files.

3. Office 365

Teams is the heart of our communication. It was not easy to leave Slack but in the end, it was the right choice. Everything is connected in the Microsoft world. From mails, appointments, inline editing of files to a good chat solution the single pieces work really well together. Office 365 delivers us great benefits in our daily business. Microsoft has a history of complicated setups so we had our doubts. I am still not a big fan of SharePoint, that’s why we replaced it by confluence. Our main tools: Exchange, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. The rest of the given tools are currently under inspection, but we have amazing alternatives in place.

Every tool that we use is connected to our Teams via webhooks and sends out messages in dedicated channels.

4. Microsoft Azure/Kubernetes AKS

In the beginning we were running Kubernetes on some Ubuntu hosted VMs but quickly switched over to using Kubernetes AKS by Microsoft. This delivers us good scalability and tons of benefits in terms of flexibility.

5. Confluence

Due to our disliking for SharePoint we started to use Confluence. We are only using it as a wiki and so I think the pricing is too high for us. Still, it is an amazing tool, but currently we are using just 1% of it. The biggest benefit are the easy setup and the good usability. If SharePoint or Microsoft would create a simple wiki system with file uploads capabilities in Office 365 we would probably move to that.

6. Passwork

As security first company we needed a central password manager system. Passwork is one of the smaller companies out there, but it does the job and the pricing is awesome. Protected by a master-key it has anything we need. Only the mobile application lacks a lot of features, but thankfully the desktop version works pretty well on my cell phone. In addition I also use KeePass for my family’s shared passwords.

7. Hubspot

While we are growing it gets harder to track all those leads, contacts and businessopportunities. Hubspot is our first step to get the perfect CRM for us. It is free and easy to use. The email and mobile apps are amazing. It lacks a lot of features we would need, but it provides an API which gives us a lot of opportunities to integrate it into our own processes.

8. Github

Still the best Online Repository system. Easy to use, easy to setup. It’s close to perfection.

9. CircleCI

After ditching Azure Pipelines/Visual Studio Online we switched to CircleCI. I like the speed and the settings brings a lot of features. The pricing is also really good.

10. Trello

One of the most underrated tools out there. Trello is the best Kanban board out there. All of our projects are managed by it. In addition, all our customer interactions are done via Trello. Thanks to this we currently don’t need any additional support ticket programs.

11. Clockify

Toggle was too expensive and clockify was the perfect clone with awesome pricing and it keeps getting better every day. Give it a try!

12. Fastbill

It’s our Go-To Solution for everything related to write and manage invoices.

In the next couple of blog posts we will show some details of how we use our beloved tools ;)