Clevergy´s journey. A startup logbook. Month 5
A lot of things happened this month… sometimes it is difficult to assimilate how much you do when you are in startup mode.
Summarizing we were working on releasing our mobile apps, growing our B2C product, learning about our errors, Google for Startups, and improving the performance of our platform:
We have released our iOS and Android apps.
We are really happy about it because anyone can download it now, understand their house consumption, and save money and energy. Two hot takes:
- We were right about our micro-frontends strategy. This is bringing us a lot of benefits. Not only on the web, with this approach it is very easy to have updated your app. Here is an interesting post about that: https://ionic.io/resources/articles/micro-frontends-for-mobile-with-ionic-portals
- Uploading an app to the stores is not easy and it can be frustrating sometimes. Especially Apple is very picky with its apps and, although their comments help you to improve the app, sometimes they force you to do some changes you think it is not the moment for it.
Tech enabling incredible B2C possibilities
We unlock the possibility of having the consumption of every person who completes (only with DNI) the registration in Clevergy. So, if you want to understand your consumption and start saving energy, sign up now for free!
New team member´s onboarding.
Pair programming and TDD are so good. In the first week, the new member has been uploading small changes directly into production. He brings immense expertise in the domain and the way we work in Clevergy.
First postmortem.
Shit happens… but errors teach us things. In our case, we had a problem with an iOS security update and some cross-domains in our Auth0 authentication process. We know errors happen, but it is important:
- To show the company what happened.
- To understand what the impact was (it is important to have enough data).
- To take action to avoid the same problem in the future.
We use the template from Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy: “Site Reliability Engineering”.
Threads management
When the traffic starts growing and you are managing a lot of third parties requests, you start experiencing real problems. In our case concurrency is under control (🤞) but we did need to work on the threads management. As we use Kotlin, coroutines help us in non-blocking programming and thread pool management. We recommend you read about it. We will probably write a post about our experience with that later.
Queries milliseconds matter
We understand that improving the performance of every query in our platform is crucial. Speed is always important, and even more when the traffic starts to grow. We don´t use any ORM or anything similar because we think that every query is important. Moreover, the previous month GCP released a very cool feature, the Queries insights, that help you to monitor without additional effort your queries.
We are in a Google for Startups program!
Last but not least, in September we started in the Google Campus of Madrid in the Sustainability program. Very interesting talks, amazing networking, and mentoring, so we thank Google for that. Furthermore, we can use the incredible Google Campus installations to work there.
Stay tuned for the next edition!
