I always try to improve my development stack in order to gain productivity. And during the last few months, there has been a lot of change.

Here is my current development stack that I use to create web apps:

Front-End

Bootstrap: A great HTML/CSS framework. It helps you build MVC very fast. Sass: A language compiled into CSS which adds many features such as variables, imports and functions.
Sass: A language compiled into CSS which adds many features such as variables, imports and functions.
Jquery: Good old Jquery, indeed. I may start to use angular in the next few weeks if I have enough time.

Back-End

Ruby on Rails: The most productive web framework I have ever worked with, much faster than any PHP framework, and enforcing many good software engineering practices.
PostgreSQL: Faster and most powerful than most RDBMS (including MySQL), and free.

Hosting

Heroku: A great PaaS, and free for small apps. I also tried Google App Engine but its lack of flexibility was a problem for me.
Cloudflare: It makes your app load faster and gives you a free SSL certificate.
Mandrill: Very easy to use, yet powerful, EaaS (Email as a Service). I use it to send transactional emails like welcome messages and password resets.

Deployment

Git: I configured it with a pre-commit hook which automatically runs rails tests. And thanks to Heroku a simple push deploys my code. It’s very useful and now I just couldn’t go back.

Monitoring

Pingdom: A great tool to receive alerts if your app goes down (and if you add IFTTT you can receive them by SMS).

Let’s see what it looks like (with the help of a great website I recently found):