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CASE STUDY
Sports social network app

Client

Sports social network app

Industry

Sports

Product

API

Admin system

Date

January 2021

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Twilio

Optimization

REST API

About the project
The platform offers a sporty twist on traditional social media, created by athletes for athletes. It enables students to share their match scores, personal records, and statistics across various sports, while also providing a space for them to connect and chat with other players. A leaderboard encourages players to compete and regularly post their scores and results. Additionally, the platform provides provides high school, college and club coaches the opportunity to scout promising recruits and connect with their students. Although initially developed with lacrosse in mind, the platform supports a multitude of different sports and disciplines.
The Problem

The platform was initially founded and developed before our involvement. The application was crippled by outdated, unoptimized solutions and staggering technological debt. While acceptable at the very beginning, performance quickly nosedived, unable to handle larger amounts of players, coaches and statistics, while the lack of a coherent test suite and documentation made the maintenance process exceedingly time consuming. After a thorough analysis, it was agreed upon that instead of refactoring and maintaining the initial application a completely new one would be developed from scratch.

Existing application’s main issues
  • Extremely slow performance and unoptimized code with many bottlenecks
  • Unmaintained test suite not covering the critical aspects of business logic
  • Incoherent business logic paired with a complete lack of documentation
  • Outdated and unmaintained solution stack
  • Lack of error and resource monitoring tools
  • Insufficient communication and support from previous developers
Our priorities

Modern solution stack

A modern, maintained tech stack offering efficient, streamlined solutions ensures more time is spent developing the application rather than adapting outdated technologies to modern requirements.

Complete, maintained test suite

Covering both critical and non-critical code throughout the application, a maintained test suite guarantees there are no breaking issues when any facet of business logic is modified.

Optimized performance

By optimizing the critical code sections we’ve ensured there are no bottlenecks or performance issues, particularly in functionalities requiring handling thousands of records in quick succession.

Reliable monitoring tools

Implementation of modern monitoring tools allows us to quickly be notified of and identify any ongoing issues.

Transparent customer-developer communication

Effective communication with the customer allows us to identify priority tasks on the fly and quickly implement necessary adjustments.

Outcome
Having developed the new application from scratch, we were able to replicate the original application’s functionalities with necessary optimizations in less time than it would have taken to refactor and optimize the initial project. The result is a modern, easily maintainable application with an up-to-date solution stack that allows us to quickly implement and deploy new functionalities, while a complete test suite ensures the business logic suffers from no major ongoing issues.
What we accomplished:
  • Complete rewrite of the application from the ground up
  • Major code optimization
  • Implementation of a complete test suite
  • Major security and maintainability improvement
  • Implementation of reliable monitoring tools