A Company’s Story Crystallized: Dev Demand

Dan Holmes is a developer and business expert from Dev Demand Co.,^[27] which is an enterprise startup accelerator, assisting enterprises to innovate within their industry. It is based in Ipswich Queensland, Australia.

Ivo:

What production projects do you use Crystal for?

Dan Holmes:

We have built an open source command-line project management tool called OM.^[28] We’re now building a larger commercial product called Notification Engine, which is designed to aggregate notifications from many providers and digest them to email at a speed and frequency that can be customized. 

Ivo:

Why did you decide to use Crystal for these applications?

Dan Holmes:

We love the syntax of Ruby but hate its speed. Crystal has the beauty of Ruby syntax and the power of Go. We also considered PHP and Python for our projects, but decided to go with Crystal.

Ivo:

What kinds of problems does Crystal solve best?

Dan Holmes:

We see the greatest use for command-line tools, back-end APIs, and scheduled jobs.

Ivo:

What was it like to develop with Crystal?

Dan Holmes:

Developing with Crystal is absolutely impressive. It takes very little time to understand and get started with it. It is quick to learn, quick to compile, easy to deploy. Its parity with Ruby is a big help when trying to write code, and most of the common tools you’d need to work with a statically compiled, typed language like Crystal are built in. Some of the tools are better even than the Go tooling.

Ivo:

Are there any aspects of Crystal that specifically benefit customer satisfaction?

Dan Holmes:

Customers appreciate mostly the speed and reliability of the application.

Ivo:

What advantages or disadvantages have you experienced from deploying a Crystal application in production?

Dan Holmes:

The main advantage to deployment with Crystal is that it’s a single binary you can just push. The main disadvantage, however, is that if the platform environment you’re using to do the builds doesn’t match your production environment, then you’re going to have to recompile it on the server. This is an issue easily solved by using something like Docker containers.

Ivo:

What do you like the most about Crystal, compared to other languages?

Dan Holmes:

We like that Crystal is fast and typed, and eliminates a lot of common problems you’d see in production with compile-at-runtime languages like Python and PHP. The errors seem to be much more intuitive than in Go as well, which makes debugging a breeze.