Crossroad Labs

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of ReSelf. We are developing a fitness and weight loss application that focuses on the psychology of weight loss.

What challenge were you trying to address with Crossroad Labs?

I was displeased with the development team that we had previously hired. We needed to find another company to develop an application.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Crossroad Labs is developing an iOS application that is technologically complex. The application has a series of challenges that help train individuals to be effective at losing weight. The application requires multiple transitions from one challenge to the next. The transitions were not easy and Crossroad labs managed to do it successfully and with a quick turnaround time. Crossroad Labs is also developing an Android application.

Crossroad Labs also integrated Intercom to the application. This allows us to stay closely connected to all of our users. Additionally, they helped integrate Stripe, a payment form for the app.  It’s not easy to integrate third party applications into a platform, but Crossroad Labs managed to that very well. They also developed a content management console that allows us to change and customize the text on the fly.

They are also not shy about making suggestions in order to make processes more efficient. They’ve been very much part of the team.

How did you come to work with Crossroad Labs?

I considered a couple of different groups of people. I had originally settled on a group located in Israel that was recommended to us. That group turned out to be a complete disaster. We ended up stopping midstream with them and then we went to Crossroad Labs.

I decided to go with Crossroad Labs because they were recommended by our UI/UX people and I respect them. Before I made a decision, Daniel came from the Ukraine and we met face-to-face.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested approximately $80,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began September 2016 and is still ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

At the time, I don’t have any metrics. So far we have only done two live test with small groups. We plan on doing an app launch soon and we’re looking for tens of thousands of people for the launch.

How did Crossroad Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

They are 100% responsive. For example, I was doing QA on the application and I found a small bug when you scroll down. It was 8:00pm at the time and I wrote to Peter, our project manager. Immediately, Peter took care of the bug. Crossroad Labs is really on-call at all times.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I have only positive things to say about Crossroad Labs. I found their responsiveness most impressive. You ask them something and they get back to you immediately. We’re in frequent contact with them and the team has been extremely helpful. Daniel [CEO] and Peter have a lot of experience and go above and beyond when providing their services. They’re responsible and trustworthy.  They do what they say they’re going to do and it’s been a real pleasure working with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not as far as we’re concerned. In fact, I was happy to recommend the company the other day.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was CTO of Xpiryens, which has now disbanded. We created a social app for sharing experiences. The app brings people together in the real world. It lets people stop worrying about how they present themselves via social media and instead give people meaningful value through shared experiences and in-person meetings. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Crossroad Labs?

We wanted to build an app for 10 million users and we needed someone who could help create good architecture. Old technologies were not going to work well, so we decided to use Reactive Microservice Architecture. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

I was in charge of all the development. I chose the technology, as well as did most of the design, modeling, and a lot of the coding. The app is built for both iOS and Android, and Crossroad Labs rebuilt parts of the backend to match scalability and coding standards and were instrumental in architecture design, while other parts of the team built the mobile frontend. 

True to Test Driver Design; from the get-go, we used system load testing, with tools like Tsung and Gatling. We have souped up in-house version of open-source XMPP for presence. It gives us push notification and highly scalable chat capabilities. They hooked it up to that using a proprietary API and made it more functional and scalable. They also added notifications using Amazon and other SMS providers, which gave us the ability to configure and change it as we go along.

We had a notification microservice they worked on. We decided we wanted it to be agnostic to the notification technology. It’s a very difficult environment to work with. For microservices, you pay a lot for scalability because the environment is very complex. We’re talking about millions of transactions per second concurrently. We’re talking about microservices that can shrink to one microservice or scale to ten within minutes. They have to speak to other microservices. Everything is very difficult to test and run. The code itself had to be as simple as possible.

The first job I gave them, we had a different provider who created a microservice that I wasn’t happy with. I asked Crossroad Labs to clean it up and it performed about 40% faster and consumed a lot less CPU. We could actually measure how much more efficient they were. It was at a time when we needed things to happen fast. 

What is the team dynamic? 

We had one developer and one DevOps person in-house.  We had had to make some rapid changes, leaving me with only those two resources and a big load. We were lucky to have Daniel [CEO, Crossroad Labs], and Yehor, [CTO, Crossroad Labs] join the team. From the moment I spoke to Daniel, he began working in a matter of two days, before we had even signed the contract. We spent a lot of time reviewing the code at night because we were working with the mobile team during the day.

How did you come to work with Crossroad Labs?

It’s difficult to find good backend developers who are familiar with Scala and React programming. We also had some Erlang in our stack which is also difficult. We found Crossroad Labs through one of our senior Android developers who knew Daniel personally and said he was great. I spoke with Daniel and we decided we would work together for a week or two and after that, I ended up hiring them for a lot more. I was ready to offer them a more permanent position in the team when the company collapsed, but they’ll be on my mind for my next project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them seven or eight months ago. Our company has collapsed, but it didn’t have anything to do with Crossroad Labs.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I have testing results, but the project is now on hold. We simulated 10 million users, concurrent registration and chatting. Both modules that Crossroad Labs worked on performed excellently. They made it 30% faster with hardly any noticeable crashes and bugs when they were finished. 

Through the TDD, their code had immediately undergone system stress tests and integration tests and it proved itself very useful. We do a lot of code reviews. Usually very experienced developers shy away from getting reviewed, but Crossroad Labs was happy to learn from our experiences and teach from their experiences.

How did Crossroad Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

Most of the work was done using Skype. Slack was also effective, allowing me to call them if I needed something fast. They usually worked at night to fit EST. We had to work late which suited me. They’re highly efficient and very professional. They don’t waste time.

They double shifted and we met the deadlines all in a very good-natured outflow of exchange. The human relationship part is very important. Daniel and Yehor were always full of ideas for improvement. Instead of hardcore criticism, they made it positive. We had a lot of discussions in which I learned something new from them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are very versatile; they’re not bound by any specific technology. They strive to make something excellent. If they need to, they take more time. They followed our coding style so everything was test driven; there’s evidence in quality. They brought in a lot of good ideas and practical know-how for how to create a heterogeneous microservice architecture and how to use RabbitMQ in concurrence with Scala. In general, Scala has a high learning curve. A lot of people claim to know it but they write very obfuscated code which is difficult to understand. The ability to name and write clear and concise code is very valuable. They were a perfect match for us in that sense. It takes more time but it looks better and there are less bugs. More generally, Crossroad Labs helped us avoid a few pitfalls by properly using RabbitMQ. They added value in architecture and also in down-to-earth hands-on know-how for coding and DevOps.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could have a bigger team. Sometimes we needed more developers if there was a deadline we needed to meet. They ended up working double shifts. As they get more work, they’ll be able to hire more resources.