Rightboat
Application assessment of a Ruby on Rails boating marketplace
1 — About Rightboat
Rightboat is a recreational boating marketplace from Lee-on-the-Solent, United Kingdom. They advertise the boats for sale and put the sellers in contact with potential buyers. We've been working with them since December 2022 modernizing their application stack and infrastructure, improving the performance and user experience, and adding new features to the platform.
2 — Discovery
When we were introduced to Rightboat, they were building a new product team and had a tightly packed agenda thought out for the application. They were looking for a team with experience in Ruby on Rails to accomplish their goals. At our initial meeting, we learned that they were dealing with:
- a 10 years-old Ruby on Rails application
- equally aged infrastructure
- the application had passed through the hands of several development teams and freelancers, with different objectives and methodologies
- the application had a good deal of technical debt
"The quality of development is excellent."
Nicolás Alfin | Director of Product
3 — In-depth analysis
Our first meeting was more than enough to pinpoint several key areas to analyze in the next phase of the process:
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails update
- infrastructure updates
- performance analysis of the business-critical user flows
After getting all the needed accesses we took a hands-on approach and started analyzing bit by bit.
4 — Actionable insights report
As a result of the analysis we compiled a set of recommendations:
- We suggested that the infrastructure upgrade was the first item to take care of. We outlined the strategy to upgrade the Operating System to a current version and several infrastructure dependencies like databases and caching services. The client requested that the strategy allow for continuous operation of the platform while it was being upgraded, so we suggested a phased plan that allowed them to minimize or directly avoid downtime needed for each update.
- We also made several recommendations to improve and tidy up the configuration of different services in their infrastructure provider.
- We outlined a set of recommendations to carefully upgrade Ruby and Ruby on Rails following our pragmatic take-over process.
- We analyzed the performance of the most critical user path for the application, both on the user-facing front end but also on the backend.
- We detected several issues that would be easily solved using a proper caching strategy, image optimization techniques, or needed database query optimizations.
- We also detected a problem with the javascript bundling strategy and suggested a few alternatives to improve it.
Final presentation
The team was thankful for the thorough analysis and after a few more meetings, they decided SINAPTIA was the right team to help them implement these changes as part of the changes to the product agenda. We are still happily working with them with a revamped application UX, infrastructure, and platform, taking tech debt bit by bit while we ship new features and improve existing ones. You can read what happened next here.