Founders
Started in 2009, Jeff Ancel decided it was time to to have a reasonable solution to shortening and memorizing short urls. Hurl.me was availableand he decided to use that to create this system. Hurlme.com was later won and we moved from hurl.me to hurlme.com to become more commercial.
The technology and ever demanding presence of spam bots and other hazardous issues around publicly available web applications have hit and forced us to evolve. We have been developed in 2 different languages, and open source frameworks from the get-go. We now use primarily Ruby on Rails to provide the BEST url shortening experience for our users.
Principles
There are many lessons learned over the past 3+ years. Lessons that have caused growing pains and re-construction of our site. To this avail, we have some basic design principles and industry principles that we have incorporated. We hate spammers, this is rule number 1. We hate bots, this is rule number 1. We developed this latest solution with 98% test coverage, to guarantee that we can stay on the latest technologies to get ahead of these things we hate so bad.
We've learned that you can't just "fire and forget". We will proactively challenge the status quo to keep our audiences safer. We will ban users remove public "non-user" access if we have to. We will also not require or ask of our users anything in return except to use our system. This means we monitor urls shortened through our system, and monitor reports of abues.
Industry
Our developers will actively use and produce open source technologies that will help our industry. This includes the web, short url communities, social applications; and any opportunity for open source tools we can pull out of our system.
We will contribute to bug fixes and more, and we will list the projects that we contriute to, and own, right here. Here we come!
Credit
Ruby On Rails | Ruby on Rails | Ruby on rails has been truly inspirational to my growth and maturity in all of programming. Not just the web apps in which I develop with the technolory.
Active Admin | Greg Bell & Company | Active Admin | primarily for giving us the opportunity to really get involved in a beautiful code base.
ThoughtBot | ThoughtBot | They design some really cool and inspirational apps. We just really love high_voltage, cucumber, bourbon, factory_girl, shoulda and shoulda-matchers
platformatec | platformatec | They programmed a handful of open source projects we use. SimpleForm and Devise to name a couple.
To name a few others, some we currently use, and some we don't: formtastic, slim, engineyard, rspec, capybara and twitter (bootstrap)