Publish Check provides a software-as-a-service product for getting publishers real-time analytics on content performance. It’s a sort of web-scraper technology that pulls in several metrics from different sources.
| Client: | Publish Check |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2017 |
| Technologies: | JavaScript, Python, React |
Publish Check provides a software-as-a-service product for getting publishers real-time analytics on content performance. It’s a sort of web-scraper technology that pulls in several metrics from different sources.
What Coding Sans did was pragmatic and focused on getting us the outcome we wanted.Leo Van der Borgh, CEO of PublishCheck
We had a platform rebuild carried out by an agency in the UK. It did not result in a completed product, so the Coding Sans team was brought in to complete the job.
Publish Check’s backend couldn’t deal with the huge number of requests and also critical features were missing that would have made the product more compelling for their customers.
Coding Sans worked on Publish Check’s web-based app, with a Python backend and a JavaScript React frontend.
We built discrete features that were missing from the initial build. Publish Check’s team directed us in the features to be built, and what the specifications for them were.
We built their email update functionality, providing a regularly scheduled service for each user. We also conducted quite a lot of scalability and stability testing, helping them to bring more clients on. The architecture until that point hadn’t been particularly scalable.
Besides building features and making the product scalable, we performed some DevOps work as well. New clients joined onto the platform, and we monitored the capacity usage and other factors.
Aside from these main functionalities, we provided 2-3 hours of work at a time on small features that had been missing. We also corrected how certain metrics were being displayed. It was a mixture of data-gathering, email service, and scaling functionalities.
Technologies used:
Here is what the CEO of Publish Check said about us:
“The way in which our platform had been architected by the initial agency required that, whenever we brought in a new client, a new plug-in had to be written. The Coding Sans team wrote a generic plug-in that worked across 80% of new clients’ websites and required much less bespoke coding.
This reduced the time for onboarding new clients from one to two days of coding to 30 minutes on average. This was a significant improvement, and, to be honest, Coding Sans didn’t have to do this. They could have simply offered to build a new plugin for every client and charged us each time. This is the main relevant metric.
We used Slack for communication, with a dedicated channel for the project. They were very responsive, letting us know when someone would be unavailable. It was clear whom we were dealing with.
Coding Sans is a pragmatic and outcome-focused group, rather than ideologically wedded to academically interesting ways of doing things. For an early-stage startup, in particular, this was a good way of getting what we wanted. They have a can-do attitude, putting in long hours and charging us by the day, not by the hour. What Coding Sans did was pragmatic and focused on getting us the outcome we wanted.”
