BACKGROUND

ABOUT ONEPITCH

OnePitch - created by a number of tech-savvy publicists, ex-journalists and PR industry leaders; is a company that combines decades of experience in several fields to empower publicists and journalists to effectively and efficiently tell great stories to the world.

PARTNERSHIP

Akinjide - Founding Engineer, had established a good relationship with OnePitch, and seeing a need for additional experienced engineers to deliver and bring OnePitch’s vision to life, the idea of the partnership came on board - which led to the partnership between Victoria Bros. and OnePitch. As OnePitch grew in requirements - users and services, issues regarding scaling began to spring up thus leading to breaking from a monolith lean approach to a robust, near micro-service approach.

DISCUSSION

Here at Victoria Bros., we value every process and product and OnePitch’s product was not an exception because we are deeply passionate about it. To address OnePitch challenges, Victoria Bros. (and its engineers) have gone hard - understanding the nitty gritty of every tool and services, drawing out software documentation as well as curating better trade-offs and alternatives thereby fixing long standing bottlenecks through architecturing better solutions and speeding up both feature delivery velocity and processing via several optimization iterations, leveraging latest tools and technology, whilst emphasizing on low-cost.

Even more recently, is a major version migration of its technical codebase where the consultant and the engineers in a collaborative effort, came together over several meetings to create a roadmap - more specifically understanding how the current available solution may be an hindrance down the line and thereby drawing up cost-saving and efficient stack, pruning out wastes and producing a major release in its application which saw the following benefits:

• Drastically 20% engineering cost reduction.
• Understanding users’ requirements and making tailor-made solutions and standards to address needs.
• Providing better infrastructure and observing best security practices.
• Using less digital materials and thereby showing support for the “Less digital-waste campaign” and the “Global Eco-friendly environment” mission.

TOOLS

Before now, it was just a two-tier single server cluster hosted on AWS, with a PHP Laravel and database (MySQL) running within the server. Some tools and platforms introduced were DigitalOcean for a proper QA environment setup and Reactjs for rendering client facing experience. Keeping PHP as the backend was sort of a legacy decision, a more efficient and optimized suggestion would be Go or Rust for the backend, Akinjide suggests; leveraging AWS EKS - a modified ECS, using Linux Crontab to run a lot of background jobs, and moving the database out into a dedicated MySQL server; finally setting up proper structures and environments for different development phases and the production environment. Another interesting trade off would be using Cassandra in place of MySQL database, but a major trade-off here was a difference between developing and building fast - speed, and legacy.

Musah - Senior Software Engineer, who greatly contributed to the development of the new architecture is most excited about the speed of the application. By incorporating caching mechanisms on several levels of the application, including page loading and data loading. Page loading previously was done on the server-side with a total load time of roughly 3 seconds, but was cut down to about 300 milliseconds; by optimizing page fetching, loading and rendering alongside caching: by tracking content change(s) efficiently and loading-on-demand.

TEAM

After successfully migrating the legacy architecture, QA efforts were put in by Juliet leading.

Juliet - QA Engineer, led the validation the validation of current migration including setting up the QA environment from ground-up to successfully test every depth and breadth; Cypress was used as an automated UI for end-to-end testing of the application, TestRail for management of tests ensuring they are all well documented for several stakeholders, JMeter was used for load and automation testing, ensuring the system is able to abundantly handle the scaling needs.

The current put together architecture helps the partner develop faster and more efficiently ensuring solutions can scale and meet its ever growing user base and service demand.

CONCLUSION

Undeniably, Victoria Bros. has had a significant impact into the success of the thriving OnePitch’s product and we are definitely looking forward to further improving the current product and even shipping more groundbreaking features and services. Don’t take our word for it, here are testimonials:

TESTIMONIALS

Yemisi Oduye - “I’ve worked with Akinjide (Victoria Bros.) for 8 years. Working with him and the team has been seamless. They are very accountable, sound, and professional and only push out the best quality possible. 10/10 I will work with the Victoria Bros. team again.”

Jered Martin - “Our experience working with the Victoria Bros. team has been spectacular. The developers of the team were an absolute fit to what we were looking for. The quality and development of the code, communications skills and organisation in general are topnotch. Thank you, Victoria Bros.”

Our Alumni Engineer:

Yemi Rasheed - “Based on personal experience, it was new. Working on a new tech stack - Uncharted waters. To be able to pick up a new tech stack and get comfortable with the system. New space to explore and get comfortable with.”