CoderPlace

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a cofounder of a productivity application for small-mid sized team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Gravitation, and what were your goals?

I needed (and continue to need) high-quality code and ideas to work with me through the development of an MVP. Many ideas are evolving rapidly and so a large “documentation first” outsourced engineering firm wasn’t the right fit. Gravitation was interested, optimistic, and highly involved in the problem solving process with building the first version of a product. It felt like a natural extension to my local team.

SOLUTION

How did you select Gravitation and what were the deciding factors?

I searched for senior frontend developers that showed a modern sense of design and attention to detail. High-quality interactions, strong information architecture, and an ability to build without leaning too heavily on frameworks.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Initial architecture stack was react, node, express, graohQL amd Mongodb. A decoupled frontend and backend using JWTs for auth. Mid-way through the engagement I chose to move away from Apollo in favor of a simpler GraphqL framework as well as using Mob-X. Gravitation implemented front and backend code, writing GraphQL queries and mutations, lots of frontend logic including a sophisticated drag ‘n drop that is core to the product.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Due to my small size, I worked directly with Ivan through the duration of this engagement.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

I was continually impressed with Ivan’s attitude and approach as the product and architecture evolved. He wrote quality code, implementing and encouraging JSDoc on all new code.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We communicated via slack and he was attentive and responsive. There were no black-outs or times when he didn’t respond (within reason, of course). Ability to convey ideas openly and freely in English was better than some of my American coders :).

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

To reiterate, their communication was fantastic and removed all geographic barriers.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing comes to mind. Will certainly use them again.