I was brought on initially part-time into a two-sided marketplace in the holistic services space to assist the team to go from an environment where code wasn’t being shipped to a place that could launch an MVP.
Prior to joining, I commissioned my own Market Landscape (via UpWork) around holistic services potential; one finding: 2015 global revenue = ~$40B
Better Engineering
When I arrived, the POC had been built by an offshore team in WordPress via cPanel and PHPAdmin and transferred from AWS to Digital Ocean. There was no source control. The first thing I did was `git init`.
I spent time attempting to decompose the production instance into a Docker container (of WordPress and MySQL.) I learned how tricky it is when an application is not already 12-factored to spin-up an alternative instance having functional parity. In case you didn’t know, much of the application state of a WordPress site is maintained as JSON config blobs IN THE DATABASE.
Seeing opportunity to prioritize feature creation (in support of product-market fit) in lieu of operational excellence, I put the Docker initiative on hold and spun up dev and staging instances using cPanel and PHPMyAdmin, simply copying the prod DB.
CaaS : Chatroom as a Service
First Iteration
My initial task was to integrate a chat UX with a broadcast streaming experience being built out and powered by Wowza. I settled on Converse.js and ejabberd given decent documentation, an acceptable UX, and (what seemed to be) easy integration; delivering the following POC
Next Iteration
With the web server running under CentOS on one Droplet, I had thought it smart to run ejabberd on a separate instance, installing v14 on an Ubuntu Droplet. I ran into issues opening port 5281 from the CentOS VPS to Ubuntu so I doubled-back on my strategy, opting to co-host the daemons on one Droplet (CentOS.) I then ran into package manager issues and wound up having to build and install ejabberd 18 from scratch while upgrading OTP to v20.
While this was happening, the junior engineer was working to get the Wowza live-broadcast video solution working and time wasn’t on our side to get the MVP launched.
(Additionally, at one point, I looked at using the YouTube/Hangout API didn’t find support for our use case.)
Once I got ejabberd 18 built, installed, and running, we started experiencing timeout issues; manifesting in FE with a spinner that spun for 1.5 mins before the user was finally able to get into the chatroom. I dove into the ejabberd code, and realized that there was something blocking going on server-side. I never did figure out what was happening, but about that same time I realized that the junior engineer had integrated Twilio Video for the 1:1 experience and Wowza Streaming for the 1:many broadcast experience.
Seeing opportunity to reduce waste and consolidate coding paradigms, I researched Twilio Video and realized that we could, for the MVP, likely replace the Wowza experience for both of the 1:1 and 1:many experiences WHILE ALSO leveraging Twilio Chat to replace Converse.js/ejabberd.
Next Iteration
I found and customized React Programmable Chat
The next step was to integrate with Wowza.
As their were some production issues with the Wowza implementation, I forged ahead creating an alternative Twilio Video React component using React Scripts.
At soft (internal) launch, I posited the Twilio solution and the other team members were delighted.
Though the Twilio Video quickstart project was useful, I ran into challenges around the video codecs (VP8 and H.264) between Chrome and Safari, namely getting desktop and mobile video interaction to work as expected. Digging around produced Github links helping lead to resolution (e.g. simply switching to H.264 to ensure cross-browser support.)
On 4/6/18, we had our first successful supply-side (1:many) broadcast, powered by Twilio Video and Chat.
After helping the team achieve MVP launch and when funding could not be raised in a timely fashion, I moved on.
Results
- Swooped in when feature-delivery was woefully behind, built out (desktop/mobile) UX, and launched MVP to paying customers.