Development partnership beyond code: Building the Kallanish platform
Introduction
Kallanish is a business media organization that produces news, data, events, and market intelligence for professionals who work in commodities.
Kallanish approached us with an existing platform that was in need of stabilization and support, alongside a full backlog with new features.
The client was looking for a software development partner, to lead the process & take care of everything software & infrastructure related.
HackSoft was a natural fit for that, so we jumped right into it.
The Challenge
In the very beginning, there were a couple of challenges, that required immediate attention:
Understand the business domain.
Get up to speed with a software platform that’s running in production, providing business-critical services.
Provide critical software & infrastructure support, so the platform can be up and running.
HackSoft tackled those challenges head-on, and managed to establish the much-needed stability in the platform.
Once things were stable enough, HackSoft engaged in meaningful product discussions, to deliver the next set of features that were waiting in the backlog.
Moving forward, the challenge was to find the right balance between infrastructure improvements, having a stable platform, improving the existing features & delivering new ones.
The Solution
Leveraging the power & maturity of Django, combined with the agility of React, HackSoft managed to harness its end-to-end software development expertise, by overhauling the existing systems, so they can answer the needs of our client & of our client’s clients.
Since there are a lot of background integrations and cross-system communications, HackSoft tapped into Celery, to build a horizontally-scalable system for handling background tasks of all sizes - big, small, fast & slow.
Alongside the technical expertise, HackSoft also brought much-needed product development skills, working closely with Kallanish, to figure features & improvements for all existing systems.
The Result
The result is a set of systems, powering Kallanish’s business.
With the aim of stability & observability, HackSoft continues to make sure everything is up and running, while relentlessly iterating on new products, features & ideas.
Here's what Kalin Rusev, Directior at Kallanish, has to say:
Our first challenge when we met Hacksoft was transitioning to maintaining existing infrastructure, systems and databases, in parallel developing the new system overcoming limitations and bottle-necks of the old, with a long view to build solid foundations on which to grow and develop.
With hindsight, we have achieved that and continue to add on vertically and horizontally features, products and improve processes.
As the nature of our business needs evolved, we have gone through working with a third set of project team leaders (with a bit of Covid inbetween), that transition has been smooth and effortless.
I guess their extensive documentation, tightly-knit and motivated staff has helped immensely.
Senior management's understanding of both business and actual coding makes them a good fit for anyone from start-up to mid-sized business.
I think I speak on behalf of everyone at Kallanish that we would recommend them to others who need similar help and face similar or diverse challenges to scale up their business through technology.
- Kalin Rusev, Director at Kallanish
Rado and the team have taken the time to really understand our business and to work with us in building the systems to allow us to grow.
In the five years since we started working together we have trebled our turnover and created two new companies with several product launches.
This would not have been possible without the whole HackSoft development team coming to London to spend a few days meeting our own team and understanding what end results we needed in order to scale up our activities.
I am confident that working in collaboration with HackSoft we will continue this growth trajectory in the next five years.
- Paul Mullins, Director at Kallanish
