Devstark

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Since 2018, an award-winning Nordic company has fostered an agile culture that houses a team of world-leading digital professionals, offering best-in-class digital performance marketing strategies and services. Our company helps businesses optimize ad spending against real business value all in one tool. We are the enterprise e-commerce data platform that calculates per-order business value in real-time.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire DevStark to accomplish?

• Develop a highly scalable and reliable profit optimisation platform

SOLUTION

How did you find DevStark?

Referral

Why did you select DevStark over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

What was the size of DevStark’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

DevStark was involved in the Kuvio project from the very beginning. They developed everything you can and can’t see, from our software’s architecture to the website’s button animations. Our project was built with Vue.js on the front and Node.js on the back. They also did some thorough work with AWS, including:

• AWS ECS
• AWS EC2
• AWS IAM
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Batch
• AWS Athena
• AWS RDS (PostgreSQL)
• AWS Kinesis
• AWS Kinesis Firehose
• Amazon AppFlow
• Amazon SQS
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon S3
• Amazon EventBridge

The project APIs were GraphQl and REST.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• a stable and high-load-ready service that tracks orders from e-commerces in real time;
• a scalable data warehouse that can store billions of orders and query different subsets fast using a variety of parameters;
• tools for importing millions of orders for past years and quickly performing calculations on them to provide a retrospective analysis;

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Their team was proactive and always ready to help when you needed them. Transparent communication makes working with DevStark easy and painless. Despite their team being fully remote, all the upcoming issues are solved quickly in our shared Slack workspace or face-to-face meetings via Google Meets.

What was your primary form of communication with DevStark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email
• Messaging App

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

The people are great to work with, and the vast majority of times minimal explanation of use cases is required and the developers understand what any given feature is required for and can proactively offer different solutions for us to achieve our business goals.

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

Some tasks have taken longer than expected, perhaps there could have been opportunities to take in some outside resource who knows aws better in order to avoid some of the pitfalls?

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the manager of Sales — essentially the do-it-all guy — at Kumpan, which is now a frontend development agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Devstark?

Devstark serves as an offshore development agency that handles backend development for the projects we take on. In some cases, they even help us with frontend development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Depending on our client’s requirements, we outsource both front- and backend work to buttress our inhouse development. In one project, they used PHP to help us build a medical journal CRM.

Their tech stack also includes but isn’t limited to Javascript, Vue.js, and Node.js. They typically adapt to the client’s needs — they’ve assisted in pure web projects, as well. The team partakes in our internal standups and meetings.

What is the team composition?

We work with around 3–5 people. Their team is scalable.

How did you come to work with Devstark?

We found them through an outsourcing or freelancing platform.

How much have you invested with them?

Somewhere in the ballpark of $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2015, and it’s an ongoing partnership.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their support has enabled us to execute projects smoothly. They’ve often had to push the development forward since our own backlog can delay them. They keep us on our toes and force us to be better, so they’ve served as a real consultancy in that sense.

How did Devstark perform from a project management standpoint?

We utilize Jira for project management. We’ve dabbled with Kanban and scrum standups too. They’ve mostly been effective. There is admittedly a language barrier with developers that both or our teams had to adapt to.

There’s an onboarding process of learning each other’s accents to ensure effective communication, and we’ve worked around it over time. Most of our tickets are written and their project managers are fluent, so this doesn’t impact our project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their proactivity is stellar. It’s one of the main reasons we’ve maintained our relationship; they continue to push us and provide us with suggestions for product improvements. Their business and tech competency have both made the engagement a great one.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them the tools and the confidence to succeed, and the cooperation will be effective.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive at Maximin LTD

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

My company helps business customers of all sizes, from startups to corporates, create technology products that deliver value while optimizing the efficiency of the development process.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Devstark to accomplish?

• Develop a marketplace app for both developers and investors
• Full cycle SaaS custom development
• Create a highly secure platform with top-notch user verification
• Implement an admin dashboard to manage the content and monitor the transitions securely

SOLUTION

How did you find Devstark?

Referral

Why did you select Devstark over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Devstark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Devstark helped us create our platform from the ground up. From the Discovery Phase to the MVP rollout, they were very proactive every step of the way. Key technologies include Vue.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Sumsub, and Stripe.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Thanks to Devstark, our platform can bridge the gap between real estate developers and investors. They implemented an MVP that is fully ready to go to production. For now, the most significant measurable outcome is time to market: the MVP development took less than three months, exceeding our expectations.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

I appreciate their use of modern and relevant technology stacks, their proactive approach, and their willingness to offer suggestions and improvements rather than blindly following specifications. Their organization and quality of work were impressive. For the first time, I accepted deliverables without any revisions. They operate as a self-sufficient team, requiring minimal oversight, and consistently deliver high-quality results based on the initial task provided.

What was your primary form of communication with Devstark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

What I found most impressive about this company was their sense of responsibility, precision in their work, and, most importantly, their proactive approach to project implementation.

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

I don't have any specific suggestions for improvement at the moment. Perhaps in the future, as I work on different projects, I may be able to provide feedback.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Sunbay B.V.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We develop custom software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Devstark to accomplish?

• Front end development

SOLUTION

How did you find Devstark?

Referral

Why did you select Devstark over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Devstark were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Front end solution that is used for configuration and testing of a back office.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Sprint demos.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They are always on time and online on demand.

What was your primary form of communication with Devstark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Direct communication and problem solving speed.

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

None

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of INFOGRATO LLC

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are an online platform for graphic design that enables users to swiftly and effortlessly create professional-grade design projects without possessing any design expertise; We also offer a free presentation template service for any taste and occasion. A helpful presentation tool that allows you to supercharge your presentation with a custom design.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Devstark to accomplish?

We wanted to create a presentation tool to help keep the creative spark while spending minimum time on the creation for a better presentation experience.

SOLUTION

How did you find Devstark?

Online Search

Why did you select Devstark over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget

How many teammates from Devstark were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The most significant part of the project was creating the presentation builder. The builder had to let users make multiple slide presentations in different sizes. The difficulty in building this part of the system was in the large amount of small but essential features that were partially challenging to create. You can find some of them in the list below: 

• Ability to generate slide compositions from different types of elements such as text, images, pre-made SVG illustrations, shapes, etc.
• Rich edit tools for text, image cropping, elements resizing, etc.
• Rich coloring tool with eye dropper feature and ability to create gradients
• SVG Illustrations editing - the ability to color every separate part of an SVG illustration
• Shapes editing features
• filling shapes with color, gradient, and border styles (type, width, color)
• Slide’s background settings
• Undo and Redo functionality
• Autosave builder content to cloud with internet connection check
• Zoom In and Out feature

Another critical step was to build necessary functionalities around the presentation builder for the comfort of its use. At this development stage, the DevStark development team implemented the following functionalities: 

• Search for templates ranked by the proximity of the template size to the size of the presentation
• Fuzzy search for templates by multiple fields, such as template title, description, tags, etc. (considering morphology and typos)
• Slides management tools: drag-n-drop reordering, slide duplication, etc.
• Search elements (icons, shapes, illustrations, etc.)
• Ability to upload own images, icons, SVG images, etc., to use in presentations
• Ability to download a presentation in different formats like PFD or JPG/PNG archives (the roadmap for future development has more options)

Separately, we can highlight Functionality that allows users with designer rights to contribute presentations they create as templates for later use by other users. As well as a functionality that allows administrators to approve or reject contributed templates; Admin functionality that allows you to manage template categories, tags, presentation sizes, user rights, etc. 

Developing the public part of the service, which is not just a static landing, immediately provides real dynamic content (presentation templates) that you can select and start using right away. This part was built to be indexable by search engines, meeting all relevant requirements such as server response time, SEO-related requirements, etc. The technology used in this project was: 

• Node.js
• ElasticSearch
• PostgreSQL
• Vue
• Canvas
• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We started to make one product, but in the course of development, many things changed on the spot: from just styling some elements or interface blocks to changing the behavior of existing features and adding entirely new ones. 

But despite the dynamically developing requirements, the team remained flexible and delivered the functionality within the adequate time frame. The work on the project still needs to be completed, but the things that are important to us are being delivered at the pace appropriate for this project.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

We used Slack and Google Meets to communicate with their fully remote team. DevStark’s development team is always ready to advise the best ways to solve development issues and help choose the right path to avoid them. 

We worked together on two projects, and on both of them, the priorities were set in a way for us to reach development milestones as fast as possible. They were proactive if there were any setbacks and found ways to make what we wanted to happen with minimal quality loss and dev time.

What was your primary form of communication with Devstark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I've had an extremely positive experience working with this development company. The aspect that stood out the most was their professionalism and profound knowledge of coding which was instrumental in building our project. It was evident they had an impressive depth of expertise that you don't always find. 

The team members were not only proficient in their roles but also personable and friendly, creating an excellent working relationship. They demonstrated great communication skills, always responding swiftly and ensuring we were on the same page throughout the process. What impressed me further was their problem-solving abilities - any issues we encountered were tackled head-on and resolved efficiently. 

The quality of work was superb. There were a few bugs, which are expected in the realm of software development, but they were promptly identified and resolved without causing any significant delay to our timelines. The team was always on schedule and adhered strictly to the planned sprints, delivering each phase as expected. 

Furthermore, the company brought a level of innovation to our project that exceeded our expectations. They proactively recommended new ideas and technologies that significantly enhanced our final product. Their insightful suggestions were a testament to their commitment to delivering the best possible solution for our needs. 

Overall, their unique mix of technical expertise, great communication, problem-solving skills, and innovation sets them apart from others. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a top-tier development partner.

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

I am truly satisfied with all the work they have done. Honestly, I am so pleased that I have no complaints in my eyes, everything is good. If I were to suggest any area for improvement, it would only be to continue maintaining their high level of service and commitment to clients like me.