Portland Pedal Power
Portland Pedal Power (PPP) is a cool catering company that delivers great healthy food via bicycles in downtown Portland, Oregon. Catering by bike sustainably brings food and products to businesses which reduces traffic congestion and C02 emissions on busy downtown streets. PPP helps companies enhance their sustainable business practices and actively lessens their environmental footprint. PPP also encourages their vendors to think differently about packaging, waste, and reuse practices. Their fleet has grown to 14 delivery bikes and they are catering bigger and better lunches while fueling local restaurant sales.
Project Overview
PPP outsourced all of their tech development and administration to Chromedia. Our involvement began with production software that had some partially completed unreleased new features, along with servers that had been mostly neglected for years and were more than 3 versions behind. Our first tasks were to refactor the existing codebase, fix long standing bugs, create a quality control plan, modernize the server software, migrate to AWS, and then plan, build, and release new features.
Key Services Provided
AWS System Administration
UI/UX Design
Web Development
Project Management
Quality Assurance
Our Approach
Refactored the backend and updated libraries
Restructured the database to modernize and eliminate redundancy
Migrated to AWS and updated all software
Added security and site monitoring systems
Implemented Quality Control measures
Built new features and functionality
Updated UI for the application
Highlights
- Active participation from client with daily stand up meetings
- Client encourages our team to push back on ideas and collaborate towards new solutions
Challenges
- Previous developers did not properly fork their work into new branches, requiring us to review their work, refactor their code, fix their bugs, and quality check everything before we could launch a single line of our own code. This was a big set back on timelines.
- During the first week of our partnership, the PPP site got hacked to mine bitcoins and the business critical systems slowed to a halt. The outdated servers had no means to defend themselves and the server software could not be updated until the new code could be refactored and launched. We had to manually monitor the servers and fight back the hackers for months until we could migrate to a new and secure environment.
