Some gyan on architecting an MVP

Almost every engineer has been in a position where they are forced to choose between shipping a shoddy product to meet the deadlines vs taking time to do things right.

Oh, the catch-22 between perfectionism and delivery.

Storytime

A client with a defunct codebase reached out to us for help. They had the code of a web app and mobile app which they claimed was once working. Now, their tech team was AWOL and the app was down and buggy. They had a new AWS account where they wanted us to set the backend up on.

We went in. Got access to the git repositories, AWS account, app store, etc. Deployed the application and made it work somehow. The client was happy. In the process, we discovered some glaring abysmal blunders:

• images and videos uploaded by users were being saved in externally managed MongoDB gridfs.
• there was a sham authentication in place, every API was open for all.
• base64 encoded files were then cached in a managed Redis instance on AWS.
• no tests. no documentation. incomplete deployment automation.

We tried to communicate the severity of the disasters awaiting them if they became successful. Even if no one discovered the insecure open endpoints and messed with their users’ data, the day their AWS credits expired, they would be under a huge AWS bill because of the external data transfer and managed Redis caching user’s images.

What I found ironic was that they were able to easily rationalize paying our hefty....... Read more

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Article written by Anuvrat Parashar