Geeklist: All the Cool Geeks Are On It

“Technologists are an increasingly important force in our economy, but nobody is servicing them properly,” explained Reuben Katz, co-founder and CEO of Geeklist. This was the problem Katz and his co-founder, CTO Chris Sanz sought to resolve when they founded Geeklist, a comprehensive directory of developers that gives them tools to connect and generate opportunities. Through Geeklist, companies can also share the work of developers with a targeted audience of other community members.

As the platform grew, people outside the typical developer community came to Geeklist to get involved in the process of building tech products. At that point, the heavy load began to cause a latency issue. Speed and performance were not what they needed to be either, and the company’s current cloud provider would have charged an arm and a leg to deliver the service Geeklist needed.

Building for Ease and Agility

Geeklist is all about building a community of developers, and one rapidly growing community the founders were always a fan of is Node.js. They made the decision to build everything using Node because it was “simple, light and easy to use.” Plus, as Sanz said, “we wanted to prove to the world that it could be done.” Right away, the advantages were apparent. Node made it possible to ship code quickly because it saved Geeklist the trouble of switching context between their client side JavaScript and their backend code.

The Perfect Combination for Performance and Uptime

After committing to building on Node, running it in production on the Joyent Cloud was the obvious choice. Geeklist’s team of Linux developers also use Joyent’s debugging and performance tuning tools for Node, so using Joyent guaranteed visibility into real-time performance issues and other important visual insights into misbehaving applications. Not only is Joyent built for optimum performance with Node, but Joyent’s expert customer support team satisfied the founders’ need to use a cloud infrastructure that would, as Sanz put it, “truly be a partner in what we were trying to do.”

The Results

Geeklist is just over seven months out of a private beta and has over 60,000 users. To date, there have been over 198,000 instances of a Geeklist users following another developer and together these developers are collaborating and building connections at a rapid pace. Users have added over 83,000 links added in under four months and now tout 5,100+ communities. Finally and astonishingly, there are over 1,000,000 activities inside Geeklist as well.

We’re proud to be joining forces with Geeklist to help them unite the developer community. They’re only going to continue their explosive growth - and we’ll be behind them to make innovation, collaboration and communication happen every day.



Post written by rachelbalik