This is the first post in our "Cloud Stack Guest Post" series. James Yu is co-founder at Parse. He spends most of his time focused on the user experience and design of the platform. And of course, he’s still slinging as much code as he can.

We’re currently in the golden age of builders. There has never been a better time to build apps that solve the exact needs of consumers and businesses. As I write this, countless entrepreneurs are busy at work building their products and preparing to distribute them to the world. It’s an exciting time to be in technology.

Our goal at Parse is to enable developers to build high quality apps faster. We provide a platform that takes care of all the plumbing necessary when building rich and connected apps. Two years after our launch, over 70,000 developers are creating apps on our platform.

Developers love our platform because it gives them leverage. In this day and age, every hour you’re rebuilding the wheel is an hour not spent on the core of your product. You need to maximize your time on designing what makes your product special, and then figuring out your distribution model.

In other words, if you’re spending most of your time thinking about your JSON serialization method, you’re doing it wrong (unless, of course, you’re making a developer platform).

At Parse, we practice what we preach. We could not have built the company without the help of these stellar services:

Pixelapse "We do our design reviews using this tool. It’s like a GitHub for designers. I wanted a way for our engineers to give feedback to our designers, and, after researching similar services, this was the best one."

Amazon S3 "All our file storage resides here."

Help Scout "This is how we do direct support for our users. They’re great because it’s a thin layer on top of email that feels natural for end users."

Amazon EC2 "Parse runs on Amazon. They’ve basically defined the industry of abstracting away data centers."

Swiftype "Provides a simple way to add search across your site. We use this for our documentation search rather than setting up a search index ourselves."

Asana "Low overhead task management. We’ve found this service to be the lowest barrier to entry from thinking about adding a task to actually adding it."

Chartbeat "Real-time analytics that we use to get insights during product launches."

GitHub "For code collaboration and sharing, look no further."

Mixpanel "Excels at giving us insights about user funnels."

StatusPage.io "Having a single place to tell our customers about issues we're having makes it extremely easy to keep them in the loop at all times."

Stripe "Payments for developers. They did it right."

Olark "We used this early on to chat with our users directly on our site. This was great to have deep conversations with early adopters."

Mailgun "Easy mail sending for developers."

Marketo "Easy to use marketing automation which allows us to qualify sales leads from our website visitors."

Google Analytics "A given for any website these days."

You can follow James Yu on Twitter @jamesjyu. To see what other startups and companies are using, check out Cloud Stacks.