The Making Of Slush App 2016
It's been 4 years since we made the first versions of the Slush mobile applications back in 2013. Fast-forward to this date and almost every developer at Qvik has had their chance to leave their mark in the apps' codebase. Let me take you through the journey of making the Slush App!
The Slush App is in many ways different from the rest of our projects. First of all, Slush has a clear startup mindset while most of our projects are more or less corporate. For us, it has been great to see an event like Slush grow from a small scale assembly to a widely known world-class tech event. To give events like this our full support, we have been developing the Slush App as Slush conference partner and outside office hours. This also has contributed to making the development process greatly differ from that of our other projects.
Contrary to our customer cases, when making the Slush App our development philosophy has been ‘end justifies the means’ with an ultra-lean process. This year, however, we saw it was time to refactor the accumulated legacy logic and put in serious extra effort to clean up the codebase. With more robust and reusable components, better stability and performance gains ensued! Not to mention increased developer happiness, of course.
I asked one of our freshest employees, Juhana Kommeri, who was among the most significant contributors to this year’s Android app, what it was like to jump in the fold to make the Slush app happen. He states: “Building new features on top of the relatively clear codebase was painless and there was a good community to help in case of any issues.” I am certainly happy to hear that!
Enthusiasm + pizza + drinks = eventually good results
Our development work has mostly occurred during nights and weekends as all of us are busy with customer projects during office hours. Clearly, the sessions by the bar counter at our office, together with the Slushies and the guys from Steerpath, were fun and productive enough to lure people to work on weekends – one Sunday we had 11 people at the office, busy at hacking away on the remaining features.
After several cliché pizza and Coke (and the occasional beer) -fueled sessions, we were done with the apps again. Apple’s review queue did its best to tackle our iOS release, but luckily – after a few magic tricks – the app was reviewed and accepted on time, and once again we were able to deliver, with several days to spare!
Sami Hakkarainen, Head of Design at Slush, comments on this year’s project: “It has been a joyful ride to work with Qvik again and to see all the new features coming alive one by one. I really love the enthusiasm and attitude the team has for small details and requests that suddenly appear even when the deadline is getting closer”, he states. “This attention to detail really shows in the finished product and has already being praised by the users even though the app has been available only for a short time. Super big thanks on behalf of the whole Slush team!”
It was also great to hear positive feedback straight from the slushers using the app. Many stopped to chat with us and just praised the app – and this made us very happy. We hope you enjoyed using the apps as much as we enjoyed making them!
Already looking forward to next year!
