Introducing Masse, a New Shopping Platform Combatting Fake Reviews

vogue.com

6 points·Nelkins··5 comments

Hey all, this is the startup I work for (I'm employee #1), and we launch today! It's a product recommendations app for iPhone that allows you to ask your friends questions and get recommendations in response. Think Stack Overflow meets Instagram meets product reviews.

If anyone is interested in the tech stack, the iOS app is in Swift, the backend is about 90% F# running on AWS Lambda, and for our DB we're using a combination of Postgres, Dynamo, and Neo4j.

Link to app is here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/masse-app/id1400627501?mt=8

Any and all feedback is appreciated! :)

As employee #1, presumably you had a say in choosing the tech stack - any particular reason why you chose F#?

The team is mostly ex-Jet, and we had a good experience using F# there. Expressive type system, pattern matching, etc. etc. It has all the bells and whistles of a modern programming language. I find that it is very effective for rapid iteration: the type system protects you from bugs when you don't have time for complete test coverage, and there's basically a .NET library for everything under the sun. It makes it easier to spend our time focused on pushing out business features. Also the dotnet CLI tool for Lambda is really easy to use, and made getting something up and running a breeze.

I had also been using it daily for the past two and a half years, so it was just easy to hit the ground running with it. The second employee hire was my boss at Jet and he was on board using it, so we simply continued.

Very cool. Any chance you guys considered the SAFE stack?

ha, Not really. We are using Giraffe though, which is pretty close to the "S" (Saturn, which is a layer on top of Giraffe).

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