Hacker Works Collaboration

About the client

Hacker Works is a company that builds cutting-edge bespoke web applications and platforms. In addition to full-stack development, they provide other services to help companies develop their digital products and get from idea to revenue. Fueled by a commitment to adaptability and responsiveness, the company thrives on embracing change, iterating rapidly, and delivering results with efficiency. Their agile and pragmatic mindset allows them to balance innovation and practicality, ensuring feasible and impactful solutions.

About the problem

According to Vladimir, Hacker Works CEO, finding experienced engineers who share similar values and apply a holistic approach when building software is complicated. He looks for professionals who can adequately elicit requirements and capture the essence of the problem, design a solution that fits all given constraints, and deliver a high-quality application running in a production environment.

The company uses React, Java, and Scala technologies to build full-stack web applications. While React and Java are popular technologies, Scala is not, and it is much harder to find people with solid expertise in this ecosystem. In the software outsourcing business, clients often reach out to you with the expectation of adding resources immediately. The time you need to start working on a project is crucial for retaining clients.

The collaboration

Three New Branch engineers worked with Hacker Works’ clients for 30 months. Each project had different requirements and faced specific technical challenges, requiring creative thinking to fit their budget and timeline constraints.

Our primary responsibilities were to design software architecture and full-stack development of various business-critical features while ensuring results with high-quality standards. Often, we took care of infrastructure and deployment tasks.

In all cases, we followed a SCRUM process with two-week-long sprints. Our engineers collaborated directly with the clients to understand their needs and design appropriate solutions. We assisted them with various project planning and management tasks.

Results and Feedback

Over this long period, the New Branch team successfully executed around 50 sprints and contributed more than 750 man-days of work to different projects. We worked on a big data processing and visualization platform, a video news delivery application, and a custom CMS for startup scouting and management.

Our most notable contributions are as follows:

• We owned and led the full-stack development for all three projects.
• We brought strong expertise in Scala, Java, and React technologies.
• We implemented many specialized UI components and complex user interaction flows.
• We delivered high-quality results by leveraging unit, integration, and end-to-end automated tests.
• We created continuous integration and deployment pipelines (CD/CD) with various technologies.
• We deployed solutions on and used various cloud services from AWS and GCP.
• We built an MVP product from the ground up.
• We worked with legacy code bases and extended the projects with new features.

Most importantly, all our clients gave positive feedback about our results and were satisfied with the on-time and high-quality deliverables. They liked how we handled unpredictable situations like changes in requirements, unthought edge cases, technical obstacles, etc.

Vladimir endorsed us for our agile and pragmatic approach, which fit perfectly with his company values. He liked our productive retrospective meetings, which allowed us to adapt to every client's unique needs and improve our execution speed with each sprint. He also complimented us for our ability to produce readable, well-documented, and thoroughly tested source code.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this collaboration was a success story that showcases the importance of finding the right partners in the software development industry. Finding experienced engineers with expertise in specific technologies is a start, but great collaborations and long-lasting partnerships happen when partners share similar values and mindsets.

The New Branch team demonstrated their expertise in various technologies, including Scala, Java, and React, and delivered high-quality results. The positive feedback from clients and Vladimir's endorsements speaks volumes about the team's professionalism and commitment to efficiently delivering valuable solutions.

We look forward to future collaborations with companies with similar agile and pragmatic values. Contact us and let's discuss how to build great things together!