Case Study: Digital Experience and Mobile
SITUATION & BUSINESS CHALLENGE
An American retail and outdoor recreation services corporation was running out of time and internal resources to complete an update of a popular section of its website in time for Black Friday.
The company’s website is built on a complex modern framework consisting of Java Spring Boot, Vue.js, and a collection of custom applications and back-end services. With internal development resources maxed out on this and other projects, the company still needed to build two service endpoints to complete the site update. Additional staff were needed, but the company would have little time to train and communicate the complexities of the website technology to new developers.
In need of skilled expertise to join its development team and ramp up quickly to release the update on schedule, the company turned to AIM Consulting, a trusted partner who has delivered ongoing support for numerous technology projects to the company for several years.
SOLUTION
Developers from AIM Consulting’s Application Development and Digital Experience and Mobile expertise used their diverse experience to ramp up on the project within one week and provide rapid relief to help the company complete the project on time. With no prior experience with the company’s massive technology stack, the engineers showcased the flexibility to merge with the company’s development team and took the lead in building the service endpoints.
Users of the website can search for specific hashtags, for example #mountains or #hiking, which are all curated on an internal content tagging system. The company needed to create new service endpoints that keep a running tally of all hashtags and the number of times they have been searched for. If a hashtag has never been searched for, the service adds the hashtag to the database, and if it has been searched for, it increments the tally by one. The developers ensured that only search terms from an approved whitelist could be added to the hashtag database. They also created an endpoint to present the most popular hashtags in a given time range, from the most trending to least trending.
Upon completion of the service endpoint project, the AIM engineers took the lead on a project that associated images with particular hiking trails based on latitude/longitude locations provided in the images. The developers provided feedback on the best way to build the service and implemented the service quickly. Among other considerations, the team needed to ensure that if an image contained a mountain biker, the service did not return trails associated with skiing or rock climbing.
Now, when a user clicks on a photo that contains latitude and longitude tags, the service searches for nearby trails and assigns the closest trail to that image. Then the user sees an icon of a map and a pin, and upon clicking the pin goes to a page on the company’s Trails web page for further information on the trail.
The engineers provided by AIM Consulting also brought the following qualifications:
- Broad familiarity with legacy and modern Java and JavaScript technologies and frameworks.
- Deep knowledge of design patterns.
- Comfort working within a wide array of agile development processes, including Scrum and Kanban.
- Experience and knowledge to ensure that the rules established for the team were adhered to when code was committed.
RESULTS
The extra muscle provided by AIM helped the client quickly close out a project in time for the holiday season. While wanting to maintain ownership of the overall project, the company needed resources who could rapidly blend in with its internal development team while taking ownership of the pieces of the project that needed completion. The client was so impressed with the skillset of the AIM engineers that it asked them to work on additional projects with their development team following the release of the website update.
