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City Row build real-time, big data analytics, IOT app in 10 weeks using Dittofi
CityRow raised $12 million in a Series A round. They needed to quickly scale up however had a huge amount of technical debt. Using Dittofi they were able to deliver on an 18 month technical roadmap in just 2 months.
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In 2020, the health tech startup City Row raised $12 million in series A funding. The funding was to be used in order to expand the delivery of their core rowing technology that delivered an immersive workout experience from homes & gyms in New York City.
The rowing technology was fitted with custom hardware & software. Using this technology, rowers joined live workout classes that were overseen by instructors broadcasting over a live video stream. The tech would then capture & analyse each pull on the rowing machine, delivering real-time analytics on each rower’s performance to the instructor & to the rowers working out in their gyms & homes.
The challenge
City Row developed their original technology based on the Python framework, Django. However, after their successful capital round, City Row saw a huge uptick in users. Immediately, the tech team at City Row realised that their traditionally coded Python solution was struggling to scale.
The scaling requirements for City Row’s tech was extreme. They needed to read, store & analyse 10,000 rowing records per second. Each record had to be collected from the rowers gyms & homes around New York City. The data would be read & written to a database. Then, the data need to be analysed against historical rowing data. Finally, if certain conditions were met, a real-time alert needed to be sent back to the rowers. This entire process needed to take place in less than 500 milliseconds. The City Row technology stack of Python, based on Django, was unable to do this & with the business scaling, they needed a new solution fast.
The City Row tech team was given 2 months to deliver a working solution however, their engineers predicted that it would take more than 12 – 18 months to deliver a working, stable solution.
Our project timeline changed and we needed to develop a new, complex software application quickly without hiring additional developers. We estimated the project would take 6 months to build, but after discovering Dittofi our existing tech team was able to build and launch in 10 weeks.
Anthony Guidarelli, City Row, CTO
The solution
City Row CTO Anthony Guidarelli researched a number of no-code & low-code technologies however he found that none of the existing tools were able to operate at the scale required by City Row’s series A funded tech team. Anthony then reached out to Dittofi. He was interested mainly in the backend technology stack offered by Dittofi which runs on Google GO code, a language that is approximately 30 times faster than Python.
Together with Dittofi, City Row set up a short proof of concept to see if Dittofi would be able to build an application in a few hours that would be able to collect 10,000 records per second from the rowing machines in NYC, store this information inside of a database, analyse the results & then send the results back to the rowers in under 500 milliseconds.
After running a 10 hour proof of concept, Anthony & his team were convinced that Dittofi’s no-code platform would be able to provide them a solution & that this solution could be delivered in less than 2 months. At this point the City Row technology team decided to entirely abandon their custom built Python code base & instead rebuild their entire real-time analytics solution using Dittofi’s visual app builder & auto code generation framework.
After running a 10 hour proof of concept, Anthony & his team were convinced that Dittofi’s no-code platform would be able to provide them a solution & that this solution could be delivered in less than 2 months.
Timeline for success
City Row took out a Dittofi subscription for their developers &, this team worked closely with Dittofi’s technical success team. Over the next 10 weeks, City Row used Dittofi to build a React based frontend, that could connect to web sockets for real-time alerting & a Google GO backend that could capture, analyse & alert on more than 10,000 records per second.
City Row deployed this code directly into Dittofi’s cloud native architecture, an entirely elastic & severless hosting environment. The final application was delivered successfully to the first class in less than 10 weeks after the project started.
Following the successful deployment City Row continued to iterate on their app using Dittofi’s cloud native architecture to make fast changes, securely to their app.
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