Chris SloweInterview
Chief scientist (Hipmunk)
Adapted from Chris Slowe's interview on Uses This, published 23 September 2011. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
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Browser
It sometimes makes me feel nostalgic: like I'm working on an early Firefox 3 RC.
Coding & Development
For the software side of things, we run Python for the vast majority of our scripts as well as for our webserver processes.
Much later, when we moved into hotel booking and started doing more detailed event tracking we added MongoDB as our primary datastore.
We have so much JS in fact we recently invested the time in converting it to a language called CoffeeScript which is just awesome, removing a lot of JS's rough edges (cleaner scoping, better handling of "this", Pythonic syntax, and avoiding type-casting around equality tests just to name a few).
Other
At the moment we have about 20 processes running Hipmunk sitting behind a software load balancer by the name of HAProxy.
We also do all of our CSS work in Sass, which plays the same role as rough-edge-remover.
A decent fraction of the last 10% may or may not be Steam, but, if it were, I'd say its fraction has been cut down a lot since my daughter was born in April.