The Tech Stack Behind Code-Garage

I'm increasingly being asked "How is Code-Garage built?" in terms of technology, tools, and services. Rather than answering each person individually, here's an article that lists all the answers.

This article also fits into the overall goal of transparency around the site and the company's activity.

Version 2.0 (October 2023)

Site/Blog/Courses

CMS: Strapi (v4)

After testing several "Headless" CMS (managed or self-hosted), Strapi seemed to us to be the perfect compromise between simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility! A choice we'd make again without hesitation!

https://strapi.io/

Front-End: NuxtJS (v3)

Since SEO plays a very important role in our communication strategy, it was essential to have an SSR-oriented tool to maintain our positioning!

https://nuxt.com/

Hosting: Clever-Cloud (PaaS, S3, and MySQL)

For the first two years, the site was hosted on EC2 machines at AWS because deploying with an image provided by Bitnami was very simple.

But the desire to switch to a PaaS model rather than IaaS, and above all to bring the data, the site, and the resources back to French territory, but especially to a French company, made us choose Clever-Cloud.

The service is great, the support is exceptional, even on technical questions, and their Cellar and MySQL add-ons made it possible to deploy the rest of the site directly with Docker.

https://www.clever-cloud.com/

Domain Name: OVH

Domain name management, DNS, and email remain fine at OVH, so these resources were not migrated.

https://www.ovhcloud.com/fr/

Live Chat: Crisp

Recently, a support chat was added to the site's homepage as well as to the CodeFlix page. In addition to being French, Crisp's product is great, and the free plan is more than enough for now.

To top it off, the API is very easy to use and directly integrated with the chatbox script (very lightweight).

https://crisp.chat/fr/

Analytics: Plausible

We had wanted to get rid of Google Analytics for something simpler, but above all something fully compliant with GDPR, for a long time. We explained the reasons for our choice in more depth in this article.

https://plausible.io

Newsletter

Brevo (formerly SendInBlue)

After hosting the newsletter for 2 years at Mailchimp and exceeding the free plan's quotas, we decided to migrate, both for economic reasons, but above all to continue bringing our data back to France!

https://www.brevo.com

Podcasts

Podcasts.com

Managing a podcast requires hosting each episode, managing specific RSS feeds for certain platforms, as well as statistics.

Podcasts.com does this pretty well, apart from some statistics whose numbers are slightly inflated by platform crawlers.

https://www.podcasts.com/

Version 1.0 (Offline)

Site/Blog

CMS: Ghost

The choice of Ghost was fairly simple because the primary goal was to move from Medium to a self-hosted blog, with the requirement of having an editor intuitive enough to keep up the writing pace of one article per day during the first year.

https://ghost.org/

Newsletter

Mailchimp

More of a default choice, the very basic needs (1 newsletter per week) didn't require us to look any further than Mailchimp, which also remains free.

https://mailchimp.com/

Analytics: Google Analytics

Configured to comply with GDPR as much as possible, the goal is still to migrate everything to a more privacy-friendly stats manager, or even a self-hosted one.

Courses

Podia

This is the platform recommended by most online instructors, fairly easy to get to grips with and very comprehensive, particularly in terms of site management.

One small downside regarding the creation of written courses: the editor is really tiny and some features are not intuitive at all.

https://www.podia.com/