Our toolkit

What makes us more productive

"It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way."

Our toolkit defines all the tools we use either internally or that we recommend to customers to make their daily work more productive. We make sure those tools are the best-of-breed and that we use them at the maximum of their capabilities.

Dev tools

• OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: Your laptop will come equipped with this great open-source operating system. We will also install some handy tools and tweaks to make your dev experience feel like a breeze.

• IDE: Visual Studio or Jetbrains. This is where you will spend a great part of your time as a dev and the decision is yours for coding in the IDE where you feel most confortable. We are using both IDE and will recommend you a selection of addons to augment your coding productivity.

• Codestream (free tier): Addon to collaborate and comment directly within your IDE. It integrates with slack and the three main VCS platform (Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket).

• Lucidchart & LucidSpark (Team plan): "Design comes first; implementation second". We put a strong emphasis on brainstorming and drawing thorough designs before moving into implementation. Lucidchart provides us with a state-of-the-art drawing tool that integrates with a multitude of tools (slack, Google slide deck, etc.).

• Slack (business plan): It is the "de facto" messaging tool. And it has become much more than just a messaging tool. We consider it as a command center that is constantly open on one of our screen and we use it for chatting, starting a Meet meeting, scheduling a meeting, sharing documents, and most importantly to be notified in case of failures on any of the services we deploy on the cloud.

• Excalidraw +: The hand-drawn feel of excalidraw is often the way to go for drawing diagrams and workflows for aticles we publish.

• Jira (Free tier): We use it for our internal coding projects. It was an obvious choice as most of our customers are using as well in their projects.

• Google Workplace (business standard plan): As a Google partner, this was an easy choice to go full steam with Google Workplace to manage our emails, meetings, documents, spreadsheets and slide decks.

• Dashlane (Premium plan): We are intransigent with security and make it mandatory to use Dashlane to manage all your passwords and to auto-generate new ones for each application you access. This is then coupled every time with 2FA (your Yubikey) to ensure maximum security.

• Loom (business plan): A small video is worth sometimes dozen of messages, documents, slide decks, etc. We use loom for short tutorials, small status updates and short messages.

Documentation

• Gitbook (team plan): We use it for our public documentation (this handbook you are reading is just one example). The simplicity, popularity, nice design and Git versioning feature convinced us quickly.

• Notion: We use it for all our private documentation.

Sales & Marketing

• Hubspot (Business starter): We use Hubspot as our CRM (customer relationship management) and CMS (Content Management System; ie our website) tool. It is very handy deal with and integrates nicely with all the other tools in our suite.

• Youtube: We have a dedicated "Astrafy" channel that we use to broadcast tutorial videos and success stories with customers.

• Crowdcast: We use it for online events to make it easy for participants to act interactively.

• Medium: We are committed to publish at least one technical article per month in order to help the community and avid coders to benefit from what we do.

• Typeform (basic plan): We use it for surveys, feedback forms to customers and quizzes.

• Framer: our website framework tool.

• FlowCV: simple tool used to have the resumes of all the team members in the same format. Also used to design email signature.

AI tools:

• Chatgpt Pro: can be accessed via the common account

• Cursor: Coding assistant.

Project Management

• Avaza: We use Avaza as our project management tool for keeping track of the different activities of our consultants at customers. Avaza has a nice timekeeping mobile app that makes it easy for anyone to register his/her hours; it then automates the billing for each customer. Last but not least, we use Avaza for expenses management; the mobile app makes it handy to register in a matter of seconds any kind of expenses.

Finance tools

• Revolut business: In an ever-changing world, we have decided to go with a modern and fully digital bank. Revolut has great advantages such very low exchange rates, handy mobile app and ease of setting budgets amongst each cardholder. Each employee will have a Revolut card for his/her expenses.

• Quickbooks (essential plan): As a company, we are required to abide to strict accounting rules. Quickbooks makes it easy to structure and arrange your various expenses into the accurate accounting category. It ingrates also smoothly with Revolut so that each transaction gets automatically registered into Quickbooks.

Human resource

• Personio: German unicorn that has disrupted the HR world. We use Personio as our unique HR platform: recruitment process, onboarding, contracts, payroll, holidays, sick leave, performance management, etc. The mobile app is very handy and makes it easy for each employee to register holidays or consult any HR related documents (contract, pay slips and so on).

• Leapsome: People enablement platform. Leapsome is the complete people success platform that helps you put people first. We use it at Astrafy for performance management, OKRs & Goals of each employee and for compensation management. Having all this key component in one unified and well designed application was of major importance for the business we are operating in where human is at core of everything we do.

Legal

• Termly: Used for all our compliance terms, consent management and legal policies.

• SignNow (Business Premium plan): Digital signature is becoming the new norm and we use SignNow to sign documents with our customers and vendors but also for work contracts with future employees.