Clients' projects

Reco.se asked for our assistance to enhance their cloud spending management, primarily in response to the rising costs of cloud computing. With the expansion of their project, it became imperative to pinpoint the right metrics and implement measures to control cloud usage effectively.

The client’s goal was to minimise these cloud costs without compromising on performance, necessitating a strategic overhaul of their cloud management practices.

To tackle the escalating cloud costs while enhancing performance, the following strategic measures were implemented: cost analysis and identification, commitment to usage discounts, enhanced observability, resource allocation optimization and dynamic scaling with KEDA.

Mob Entertainment had Project: Playtime, a multiplayer game in development. It had a basic backend service for player data, authentication, and financial transactions, but faced issues in maintenance and scalability.

The Client has tasked us with developing a game service for a larger player base, anticipating around 3 million monthly users for upcoming releases. Our responsibilities included enhancing infrastructure, creating new features, and strengthening the monetization model.

We’ve created a new backend service. And fulfilled all the requirements.

The previous team left the project, giving us a one-month transition period to take over and begin working independently. Additionally, there were also work organization challenges that needed to be addressed.

To quickly start productive work after the team switch. Organization issues needed attention and fixes. The goal was to finish up work in progress, and start new features.

The system allows for the collection and management of vast amounts of risk data and helps brokers with risk assessment. It automatically collects and updates customer risk data so brokers can focus on risk analysis. It provides a dynamic form for risk assets that can be easily adapted to market needs, together with a public API for 3rd parties to integrate and access the Corify data model easily.

COTA Healthcare is a company founded by doctors, engineers, and data scientists. They combine oncology expertise with advanced technology analytics to organize and analyze cancer data to help with advanced patient care and research. The company was developing a platform called Cota Abstraction Platform (CAP) to gather and process oncological data. By the end of 2019, SoftwareMill joined the effort to support the rapid growth of the platform.

One major Cota Abstraction Platform pain point was performance decline as data volume increased. The high amount of information and its presentation in the user interface may lead to bottlenecks and performance issues resulting in a poor user experience. Also, it was crucial to allow end users to export, analyze, and conveniently create reports. Another platform's challenge was proper system monitoring implementation.

We participated in the design of the architecture of the CAP system. Our goal was the seamless introduction of new features while retaining the stability and reliability of the project. The initial part of the platform that we started developing was tightly coupled to other parts of the system so we extracted it into a dedicated Scala service with its own CI/CD pipeline. We created a denormalized model optimized just for queries that was derived from original data. We also addressed the need for durable data exports and reporting. Our paramount goal was to migrate CAP to use the newest available versions of language, libraries, and frameworks.

An established, well-known trading system based on Scala and Akka. The system was close to its limits of traffic handling.

A new reactive platform, written from scratch with scalability and resilience as primary goals. The new platform needed to be able to take over traffic from the current one with minimum downtime.

Our team designed and implemented a set of services that communicate asynchronously thanks to extended use of Event Sourcing approach. This allows flexible recovery, auditing, and service integration. With Akka Cluster, Akka Persistence, Cassandra and Kafka we provide scalability on many levels. We also prepared advanced performance tests to ensure that the solution can handle large growth of transaction volume with time. Additionally, we built a rich monitoring setup around the new system, using Prometheus, Grafana, and Graylog.

A messaging gateway service that was running on a local data center and was no longer efficient.

The client needed to adopt the existing on-premise infrastructure to the cloud environment in order to provide a highly available, scalable and resilient system.

Using Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform on AWS, SoftwareMill developers were able to quickly test and validate different migration strategies with the aim of minimizing service disruptions down to minutes, not hours or days. The development team has successfully migrated the on-premise system to the AWS cloud and also improved availability, resilience, and scalability of the system. The complexity of the deployment process and the level of software maintenance effort were also reduced.

Previous-generation system which couldn't cope with increasing message loads.

There were three main focus areas. First, reliable delivery of hundreds of messages per second. Second, an integrated billing module with a web front-end. Finally, covering new use-cases of the system, for example new interfaces, integrating with other providers.

Implemented a high-performance, reliable SMS message queue, with nightly stress/performance tests. We also developed a web application that allowed for checking of billing status. Also, on top of the system, we created an SMS-iMessage-like solution.

Flexys is an enterprise collections software that helps companies with debt resolution. It consists of a range of modules that enable creditors to engage with their customers on their preferred channel at the right time, using targeted language. On the technical side, Flexys had an MVP of the product that proved the business model is successful. Client needed an experienced team extension that would help not only with the product kick-off but also the team setup.

Our main task was to help Flexys with the technical side of the project while they built the team from the ground-up. We functioned as part of Flexys team and provided them with deep expertise in some of the technologies they use, primarily Scala programming. At the beginning, our main task was reviewing the code base and identifying opportunities for improvements. We started implementing quick fixes and came up with a plan for making major architecture improvements. Our next goal was transferring good practices to the team. We introduced in-house team to the remote work best practices, shared the code review culture and encouraged the start of a technical reading club.

We work in a TEM (Team Extension Model) in which we augment the in-house IT team with developers that support the team with the expertise in a variety of areas including designing project architecture, developing high-quality code and mentoring. This is an ongoing development effort to build new features and functionalities for the market. We helped to develop project architecture including Akka (http, persistence), Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Angular. We also shared our best practices within backend (Scala) and front-end (Angular) technologies.

A large retail company manage their processes and operations using various IT systems that continuously generate vast amounts of data.

Client wanted to ensure data integrity and availability by entrusting us with building a robust integration pipeline to handle the vast data generated by various company departments and third-party collaborators.

We chose Apache Kafka as the most suitable tool to build the integration pipeline solution.

Old, ineffective system which took hours to process daily data batches.

Our customer builds systems used by energy providers to build long-term client relationships, increase efficiency in energy use and manage energy demand.

We helped to build a big data system, capable of processing huge amounts of data daily and later analysing them using both statistical and machine learning methods.

For more details read project's case study

LPP S.A. collects online customers’ data (mainly: orders stored in databases and customers’ online behaviour) from various sources. The company approached SoftwareMill to help them streamline data pipelines to be able to capture crucial metrics and derive business value in real-time.

Processing data, arriving at high velocity, required battle-proven tools for stream processing and the preparation of data for a recommendation engine. Due to the nature of the online retail business client needed a system featuring self-healing, as well as load balancing. Plus monitoring of the infrastructure health and performance.

Seven streaming applications have been delivered as well as devops scripts setting up Kubernetes and all necessary tools. As a result, our customer was able to attach custom dashboards to display the sales volume as well as feed their recommendation engine in a cost effective way without latency.

SwissBorg is a team of fintech experts and engineers that are creating a holistic crypto wealth management ecosystem accessible to everyone. As a pre-launch of their show-case feature, the Wealth App, SwissBorg has built the Community App, a mobile app game that allows you to predict, learn and earn Bitcoin.

We joined our client’s team and together developed the mobile game. On the technical side, we were responsible for building the back-end of the app, mainly in Scala and Akka.

The part of the app that we developed consists of the following elements:

• Forecast module which evaluates bids versus the exchange rates every 24 hours;
• Calculation module that counts each player’s score.
  Additionally, we created an advanced notifications module that sends emails, SMS and push- notifications to users notifying them about the result of their latest bids. Apart from programming, we also engaged in Kubernetes implementation in the project. We joined the client’s team on-site to share our knowledge, experience and make the implementation smooth. Finally, we were responsible for creating platform tests based on behave tool.

Reco.se is a Swedish tech company behind the largest independent review site in Sweden where customers describe their previous experiences with a variety of companies. The platform comprises two websites listing different kinds of businesses - reco.se is for local businesses and recotrust.com is for e-commerce vendors and sites.

We’ve joined our clients team to quickly scale their efforts and together we have been developing the platform on an ongoing basis. The scope of our work includes new features development, but also DevOps tasks and bug fixing. On the technical side, we are responsible for building multiple microservices to add new functionalities along the way, mainly for integrations with external systems as well as for internal data analysis to support business decisions.

We contributed to a number of infrastructure projects; one of which was moving from self-hosting to GCP cloud. We were also responsible for a major refactoring that included, for example, mailparsing project and search API project with Elastic Search integration.

A custom new cryptocurrency.

Online wallet for the custom currency and for Bitcoin, with transactions history and recovery tool in case the online wallet was broken.

We built backend system for wallet for both currencies, and analyser of blockchain, for discovery of transactions transferring money to users addresses from outside. Wallet addresses are multisig, where 2 keys out of 3 are enough to sign transaction. User has 2 private keys, our customer keeps 1, so user alone can transfer money from their addresses, but our customer needs user’s cooperation to do so.

Legacy system with zero test coverage, tightly coupled with Microsoft infrastructure and difficult to scale/maintain. Web interface was full of bugs and not mobile friendly.

High quality, scalable code and architecture that will be easy to extend and maintain. Also test coverage and infrastructure automation were two of the most important goals.

New responsive web front-end, developed in a "mobile-first" spirit. Highly scalable API bridge that provides consistent and uniform REST API and makes further migration to Scala micro services fully transparent. We built a mobile-aware, WYSIWYG CMS and made static content management straightforward. We made deployment & infrastructure management declarative and fully automated.

Highly coupled, microservice-based MVP with technical debt (classic 3 layer architecture) that was hard to maintain and problematic when adding new features required by customers or business department.

To get rid of the technical debt, prepare the system for easy and rapid implementation of new functionalities.

Refactored large parts of the system to DDD-like architecture which decoupled the components and made implementing new features easy.

Knip provides a mobile application for hassle-free insurance overview and management.

Analytical application for data warehouse.

Developed the integration module between the data warehouse and the mobile app. Created an algorithm to match customer preferences with the best offers available on the market at a given time. Created a recommendation service (REST API and a web frontend).

SoftwareMill was hired as a subcontractor to develop AI and ML algorithms to analyze the client's skin type and color. They also helped create a module for Shopify and GCP configuration. Our goal was to achieve 75% skin type and 99% colour recognition rate.

The project consisted of the following phases: 1. Preparation of the cloud environment, 2. Collecting a photo database, 3. Programming of AI & ML algorithms, 4. Creation of modules, 5. Impelmentation of the whole and internal tests, 6. Tests with a partner. The key element was to create an appropriate base on which the algorithms learn. Their effectiveness was to be at least 75% for type and 99% for skin color.

Find out a full review on Clutch.

The Codos Foundation approached ReasonField Lab with the challenge of detecting transportation modes based on data from mobile phones. The team's role would be to create an end-to-end solution that utilizes human activity recognition to calculate CO2 emission avoidance.

The Client's primary objective is to reward users for commuting sustainably. By automatically detecting the mode of transportation, the Codos app calculates CO2 avoidance compared to a combustion engine car and rewards users accordingly – a noble idea and a viable product.

The result of the first round of the workshops was the transport mode detection research document in which we described the steps needed to construct a flexible machine learning solution. This led to the development of platform architecture and a mobile application research mode. Then, we were collecting a lot of data base on the specified rules and processing it. After six months of development, we were ready for user acceptance tests of the system PoC. The cloud platform was ready and capable of serving requests from the mobile application. The machine learning transport mode recognition service was in place and waiting to run inference against acquired sensor data.

When the Client, a cancer diagnostics company, approached us, they already had a number of AI projects that assisted in medical image processing and interpretation. The company is also focused on continuous improvement of the analysis process and its machine learning models.

At the beginning of our cooperation, the Client was in the project's research phase and needed to explore the possibility of using AI for cancer diagnosis. There was a need to support their existing ML team with team augmentation to boost the research velocity and improve cancer detection.

Our tasks involved developing, evaluating, and testing various deep learning models to find those that would best fit the use case and prove efficient, accurate, and precise. We also performed an in-depth analysis of performance in terms of memory and CPU optimization. Every step of the project needed to be thoroughly documented since the result was to be used as a base in a medical device.

IP Integrated works with banks, airlines, and messaging companies providing accurate SMS reporting tools. There was existing legacy system, which didn't scale with increased demand.

Our main task was to implement efficient daily imports of SMS delivery reports. Secondly, our client neded an analytical platform, used later in the billing module. Finally, a modern web front-end was needed.

We developed an effective application that allowed for checking of billing status. We've also built a reporting platform for bulk SMS delivery, live status tracking for customers with analytics, data export and billing. The above was accompanied with a fast and responsive UI.

Ineffective and unreliable system without automation and integration with various providers.

Increase the automation of the loan repayment process.

Implemented automatic and maintenance-free loan repayment system for customers and company employees.
Created independent module, easy to modify and develop without affecting core business activity.

A Collateral Management System not fulfilling upcoming legislation changes.

A system in line with new legal regulations.

Redeveloped and adapted system functions to current needs and requirements of the bank.
Delivered complex workflow-based system.

Started the project with some dev teams.

New dev team to work on the core back-end features.

We helped to build a workflow engine that ensures flexibility and compliance. We implemented new features, code and testing patterns using best practices.

A security startup idea, for a self-managed home security system.

Implementation of the Attikis' new business and technology model to the growing home monitoring market.

We've built a VoIP module that connects to the alarm devices and sends alerts (phone, SMS, email) depending on the user-defined rules.

An existing application in Ruby, which had severe performance and scalability problems.

A scalable API service with rapid development of new features.

Migrated the backend to Scala, provide continuous development of new API endpoints used by iOS and Facebook applications.
Implemented a recommender system which blends a number of preference inputs.
Check out case study on our blog

Emotiful aggregates data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, providing an app for browsing and tagging images.

To scale his contemporary system, migrate the infrastructure to AWS and deliver new features without downtime.

We implemented social network integration, mobile Push notifications and scaled the system to handle growing user base.

SoftwareMill in cooperation with Amplus, a Polish producer and distributor of fresh fruits and vegetables, decided to tackle the important issue of food quality.

The quality of a lemon depends on such features as: color, shape, texture, lack of greening, blemishes, scars, diseases and mold. Client wanted to distinguished healthy lemons from the ones with flaws.

Raw lemon images have been captured using the procedure described in this blogpost and manually annotated.

Zerigo provides a cloud panel for DNS, an essential part of the Internet.

Improvements in the existing DNS system.

We've maintained Zerigo DNS as a whole - from the web application to server internals.

Zerigo provides feature-rich VMware View Hosted VDI and VMware-based Cloud Servers.

To improve reliability and quality of the existing software.

We've improved and extended a broker which unifies multiple VMware products' APIs into a single REST API with complex asynchronous execution support and informative error handling.

Our consultants, certified with Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka, helped clients with: integrating Kafka in an enterprise environment, communicating with PostgreSQL, Oracle, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ and other technologies, through Kafka Connect and custom Kafka applications, setup and maintenance of Kafka clusters using Kubernetes, choosing an appropriate partitioning strategy and sizing, leveraging Kafka in a reactive message processing pipeline, gracefully handling traffic bursts and distributing load through websockets to connected clients.

We are a consulting partner of Confluent. Our skills have been proven by numerous commercial projects, see Clutch for testimonials.

Our certified Cassandra Architects helped clients with: event-sourced trading engine (as an Event Store), user and content rights management system for set-top boxes, storage and processing billions of energy-related readings.

We are a consulting partner of Datastax. We've gained hands-on experience architecting systems with Cassandra, one of the most widely used scalable, fault-tolerant database, by deploying it in clusters and writing applications querying Cassandra in a number of projects.