Building RE:Connect: How HackSoft Leveraged Django and React to Deliver a High-Quality Streaming Platform for Unissu

Unissu is a leading online directory for the PropTech and real estate industry, connecting professionals and businesses with valuable insights, research, and resources. We have been working together for several years building their main platform, unissu.com.

Unissu came to HackSoft with an idea for a new streaming platform for online events, which they named RE:Connect.

The goal of the platform was to provide a seamless and engaging experience for attendees, hosts, and sponsors of virtual events.

The Challenge

The challenge for us was to build a stable and fully functional platform that could handle a 24-hour marathon of events in a short amount of time.

We had to incorporate a range of features, including live streaming, on-demand viewing, virtual networking, chat functionality, and analytics tracking.

Unissu had set a deadline of four months to launch RE:Connect, which required our team to move quickly and efficiently to deliver a high-quality product.

The Solution

To ensure that RE:Connect was stable and fully functional, we decided to use our bread and butter, Python, Django, Postgres, and Celery, for the backend stack.

Heroku entirely met our infrastructure requirements, so we hosted the backend there.

The front end incorporated a mix of public pages & private (behind login) pages, so we decided to go with Next.js.

For streaming, we picked Mux, as it was proven to be stable in other projects.

For everything real-time, we decided to go with Pusher, as our web sockets backend.

The stability of the platform was a must, that's why we started writing end-to-end tests with Playwright from the very beginning.

Those tests played a crucial role in catching nasty bugs on time & assuring the platform is going to be stable for the 24-hour marathon of events.

Results and Feedback

Everyone loved the product thanks to the awesome collaboration between Unissu's UX team and our engineers.

Horizontal scaling on Heroku helped us handle all the traffic with no slowdowns.

HackSoft always works with commercial relevance in mind and consistently produces a product that is largely bug-free!

- Eddie Holmes, CEO at Unissu