With a massive, ongoing audience growth and proprietary software designed specifically with "going viral" in mind,
What technologies power your business?
We strongly believe in using the best tool for the job. That means that we use Python, Java, Swift, PHP and Javascript. In terms of frameworks, we use React.js, Node.js, Laravel and Angular. We are also an AWS shop. Amazon has been a great partner for us. Our growth over the past year has been tremendous. We are engaging over 55 million users on our platforms alone, and AWS has helped us scale our audience with ease.
What are the most important tech developments you’re keeping an eye on this year?
We are heavily invested in microservices and Docker. Anything that will make our engineering team more efficient and productive is on our radar. Being a media company, we are also very excited by new advances in distribution, including Facebook Instant Articles and Facebook Live. We are proud to be leading the charge on these two exciting new developments. We are also investigating bots to see if this can be a novel way for our customers to get our content.
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
We are working on several projects this year, from furthering our industry-leading CMS, to redoing our front end in React to make it faster and easier to update, to advancing our machine learning algorithms that help us predict the best stories to share with our audience.
What are some lessons you've learned about working in Chicago that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
There is lots of great talent in Chicago. You don’t need a development team in the Bay Area. In fact, we are finding there is a lot of great talent that, after going to the Bay Area, is eager to come back to Chicago. Be creative in how you source for candidates. And always hire for horsepower over experience. Today’s technology landscape is changing rapidly and having smart people that are willing to learn new things will serve your needs better in the long run.
What do you look for when hiring engineers?
We look for people that are passionate about building software at scale. Since we use so many languages and technologies, we need people that can apply solid computer science fundamentals to our domain.
What else do you want the Chicago startup community to know about what you're working on?
We are building one of the strongest engineering teams in Chicago. And Dose is one the fastest-growing media companies in the world. If you are looking for an environment where you will be given the freedom to do your best work, where you will get to great build products that are used by millions of people all over the world, we want to talk to you.
Image via Dose. Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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