At LINK, we rely on a robust tech stack and communication tools to help our employees collaborate and build integrations efficiently. This article will highlight the main software tools and tech stack used by LINK employees in their day-to-day work. From communication tools to CI/CD pipelines, we’ll look inside at the technology powering LINK. Understanding our tech stack provides insight into how we operate and the values we prioritize as an engineering-focused company.
Communication Tools and Project Management
Slack
Slack is our main platform for communication. Through public and private channels, we can have focused discussions by team, project, or topic. With lightning-fast search, we can quickly find information from past conversations. Slack integrates with many of our other tools, bringing notifications and updates right into our workflows. The casual nature of Slack communication also promotes camaraderie and company culture.
Asana
Asana helps us manage projects and tasks. We can create boards to organize work, assign tasks to team members, set due dates, and track progress. Asana integrations with Slack, email, and other tools keep our project management centralized. The ability to comment on tasks and @mention colleagues enables seamless collaboration. Asana gives us visibility into what everyone is working on, while providing a way to break down large projects into manageable pieces.
Jira
Jira provides issue and project tracking for agile software development. It enables customizable workflows and integrates with Git repositories to connect development tasks to code changes. The Kanban boards give transparency into what everyone is working on and help identify bottlenecks.
ClickUp
ClickUp is used for higher-level project planning and scheduling. It provides a centralized place to manage tasks, documents, goals and due dates across the organization. ClickUp supports both Kanban and list views of tasks so the teams can work in the style that suits them best. Hierarchies of projects, lists, tasks, and subtasks enable detailed breakdowns of large initiatives.
ArgoCD: At LINK, we leverage tools like Argo CD to enable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of our software applications.
CI/CD is the practice of automating the integration, testing, and deployment of code changes in order to rapidly deliver updates to users. Instead of doing these processes manually, which is slow and error-prone, CI/CD tools help automate:
– Building code
– Running tests
– Deploying to staging/production environments
GitLab
Our company uses GitLab for hosting private Git repositories and Sourcetree as a desktop Git client. GitLab provides source code management functionality like access controls, issue tracking, code reviews, CI/CD pipelines, and more. We use it as our central code repository to store all of our project’s source code in one place. GitLab enables our developers to branch and merge code, track revisions, and maintain a complete history of code changes.
Sourcetree
Sourcetree is an intuitive Git GUI client for Windows and Mac that our developers use to interact with repositories hosted on GitLab. It simplifies common version control tasks like committing, pushing and pulling code changes. Sourcetree provides a visual interface to review changesets, inspect commits, manage branches, tag releases, and resolve merge conflicts.
Together, GitLab and Sourcetree give our developers advanced version control capabilities to manage source code changes efficiently. Having a consolidated code repository and GUI client streamlines collaboration between team members and maintains the integrity of the codebase as multiple developers contribute code.
Docker
At LINK, we leverage containers and Docker for ease of deployment across multiple environments. Containers allow us to package up an application’s code, configurations, and dependencies into a single unit. This guarantees that the application will always work as designed regardless of where it is ultimately deployed.
Docker has become the de facto standard for containerization. With Docker, we can easily build images that contain everything our application needs to run. We can then spin up containers from these images that are isolated from each other and portable across environments. The portability ensures we have consistency between development, testing, staging, and production. Developers can focus on the application code rather than worrying about the underlying environment.
Postman
Postman is our go-to tool for API testing. It allows us to easily build and organize API requests, save environments for different stages, run collections of tests, integrate with CI/CD workflows, and generate code snippets and documentation. Postman’s intuitive interface and powerful testing capabilities help us maintain robust APIs.
Benefits of LINK’s Tech Stack
LINK’s comprehensive technology stack enables efficient software development and maintenance. By adopting industry-leading tools and best practices, our developers, product managers, and designers can effectively build, test, deploy and operate applications for integration projects.
Our tech stack enables our team to efficiently collaborate, manage projects, deploy code, version control, containerize applications, test, and monitor performance. This integrated set of tools empowers our team to build seamless integrations that connect and streamline our customers’ tech stacks.
