Made with 
(lol)…. But seriously though, we truly loved working on this app and looking at the user stats for first 2 months, we probably have like 3 users including us 2 and even after that, we are still as motivated as the first day to make this app the best.
I use this app on a daily basis and every single feature has been very, very useful.
The initial design process took Iraa approximately a month. Once we had enough skeleton to start with, I dived in and coded up a very rough beta within ten days.
tldr; For the lazy ones like me
Here’s a quick list of all the tools that runs behind the screen to make jarme run as smoothly as it does -
Client:
- angular 2
- ionic 2
- cordova
- sass
Server:
- VPS on digitalocean for production
- heroku free tier for staging
- puma with nginx for serving the api
- lets encrypt for ssl
- ruby on rails
- devise for authentication
- paperclip for image upload/manipulation
- postgresql
- mailgun for sending emails
Languages & Frameworks
Initially I was thinking of using meteor.js just for the ease of running one codebase everywhere but soon abandoned the idea since we really didn’t have any major realtime feature in mind. My next choice was ionic. I was comfortable with ionic 1 and ionic 2 was in very early beta, I was itching to build something with it and this was the perfect opportunity. So I started with ionic2 beta.3 and picked the es6 version instead of typescript. I was somewhat familiar with es6 but completely new to angular2. I ended up learning a lot of both es6 and typescript while building this app.
On the server side, I wanted node.js but having learned to code in ruby very recently, I wanted to make this a bit more exciting and use rails instead.
The features we had in mind really didn’t need a noSql database and actually fits very well in an sql structure so I decided to go with postgresql.
Client
Ionic 2 was really easy to dive in even though the syntax and everything is very different from v1. I really have to give it to the ionic team for their astonishing work on the documentation. There wasn’t a thing that I couldn’t find in the docs. They also have a great slack team if you want more hands on help from the community members.
Initially, I picked es6 but soon, the ionic team abandoned support for es6 so I had to move the whole app over to typescript, which was a bit annoyingly repetitive task but a lot easier than I thought it would be. Typescript is not that bad to work with either. I kind of miss the flexibility of typeless plain ol’ .js but having a type system also made it easier to debug and maintain.
Also, there is a really nice angular1 token auth package built for devise token auth. However, it’s not compatible with angular2 at the time of writing this post. So I had to built an auth module from scratch as angular2 service. It was really fun and learned a lot about authentication and security in general.
Server
I always liked having more control over my server environment. Which is why I decided to go with a VPS provider instead of PaaS like heroku or openshift. I do, however, use those platforms for staging purposes and they are pretty handy to be honest.
Being a long time user of digitalocean, I really didn’t have to look elsewhere. I use git push for deploy with custom git hooks. The api is served over nginx and puma. Digitalocean has a great article on how to set it all up right here.
Thanks for reading
I really believe in using the right tool for the job and I’m never too religious about any programming language or framework. Which is why, this has been a really enjoyable ride for me so far. Going out of my comfort zone and using languages, frameworks, tools that I am not very familiar with is a lot more rewarding when you’re building something that you will use everyday.