We worked with Andrew S Allen for over a year to create the latest version of Short of the Week.
We handled the full-stack development, from front, to back, to system, and beyond. There are multiple statistics trackers, systems monitoring and notifications, custom content management, and many optimizations for high traffic.
We used an nginx + Varnish + lua on the backend for caching, accounts, expires, etc. PHP5.6 + MySQL for most of the data, CMS. Backbone + LESS + templates/views for the frontend.