Our software developers' favorite projects

OK, guys. This one’s pretty straightforward – when it comes to applications and software development, what’s your one favorite project you worked on at Bornfight and why?

Ivan Lesar – Software Developer

Some of my favorite projects are the interactive installations we create for museums, like the one we developed for the Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre. I’m actually working on a similar type of application  right now – it’s not a large application, but it has a couple of really interesting elements we need to handle, and it also allows me to tackle both the software aspect of it, as well as the hardware. The project combines fairly complex back-end development with complex front-end development, so I have the chance to work on and experiment with bots sides.

It’s basically a game for museum visitors, and it will use Kinect as an input device, so visitors could use hand movements to interact with the elements on this large 3D simulation. And the best part is that 6 instances of that game will be connected in the final product, so 6 people will be able to play it simultaneously.

As the game is fairly fast-paced and every interaction triggers a number of changes that happen at the same time, all of those interactions had to be extremely optimized and responsive, so we put quite a bit of emphasis on polishing that part – the goal is for all the museum visitors to have the best possible game experience.

As I said, I really enjoy working on this interactive installation because it allows me to be both a back-end developer and a front-end developer, and to also connect all of those elements with really advanced hardware. I like exploring new technologies and experimenting with it, and this one project enables me to show my logic, visual and creative sides all at once.

Rudi Jurišić – Software Development Team Lead

Moja Žuja loyalty application for Zagreb Brewery is definitely one of my top projects. Building a loyalty program by itself is an extremely complex piece of work, but we also upgraded it with a lot of great elements. One of the key features of the app was the QR code scanning system that enabled users to collect in-app reward points by scanning a code that was printed on a receipt every time a user bought an Ožujsko beer in a store, restaurant or a bar.

It was an amazing way to connect online with offline, because bars and stores in Croatia never used receipts to print out QR codes that were connected to loyalty mobile apps. After the launch – it was available all across Croatia!

There’s also one more project – this one is not for a client, but for us internally. We call it the Vremenizator, and it’s basically a plugin for our time-tracking tool that allows us to use it straight from the Macbook toolbar instead of constantly using the web interface. It was a fun little project that allowed me to experiment with different approaches to solving the same problem – we now have three different versions of the plugin, and it ultimately streamlined our entire time-tracking process.

Ivan Hlevnjak – Junior Software Developer

OK, this one’s easy – it’s actually a project I’m currently working on, and it’s one of the biggest challenges I had in front of me since I joined Bornfight. It’s a B2B enterprise mobile application whose goal is to help our client improve the sales aspect of their business as well as their internal processes. The application is made specifically for their salespeople and it comes with a variety of gamification elements, like challenges, achievements and rewards.

As our client has hundreds of retail locations, one of the things I find most interesting about this application from the back-end aspect will be the amount of real sales insights and data that will go through it. This complex analytics is one of the most important parts of the entire application, so we’re fully focused on creating the entire architecture that will be able to handle all of the data and give our client relevant information based on that data.

We’re doing it all on Symfony, which is an extremely powerful back-end framework – but we need it due to the amount of data this app will be processing. There’ll be spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of data – and that’s just for our client’s main company. We’re also making the app fully scalable, so that our client could simply integrate all the other companies within its group and connect them into the app.

Even though we’re still a couple of months away from the finished product, this is most certainly my favorite project so far.

Andrija Dvorski – Junior Software Developer

It has to be the Data Streams platform we developed for Digital Assets Power Play. It was a really large project, very challenging and technically extremely complex. I really liked working on it because it was fully based on microservices – and when you’re dealing with microservices, there’s a lot of asynchronism, which makes microservices extremely interesting to work with. The entire architecture of the project consisted of 15 different microservices, and each one of them had a large number of multiplied instances.

You see, the main task of the entire platform was to go through different trading marketplaces, collect information about trades for thousands of currencies and present them all to users, so everything needed to work like clockwork. The goal was to make a centralized platform that could present users with the freshest information from more than 100 marketplaces at the exact moment every single trade occurred – and that meant we needed to fully optimize the process.

This optimization part might sound easy, but the entire platform had a large number of those microservices that were all connected together and processed obscene amounts of data, so there was a lot of optimizing involved. I enjoyed doing that part because it involved a lot of planning, as changing the way one microservice works could affect the way other microservices work.

All in all, we had quite a lot of freedom to try different processes, experiment with different technologies and learn new things, which made this project really amazing.