Show HN: Professional growth in 2 min a day [total rebuild of iOS app]

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bunch-ai-leadership-coach/id1500872908

by darjagutnick • 4 years ago

11 9 4 years ago

apps.apple.com

Making time for professional development can be tough - especially when it comes to the “soft skills” often needed to progress in your career like:

Giving and receiving feedback Addressing problems in your team, or even the simple art of how to say no when you’re overloaded with requests

Courses or training programs in this area tend to be super generic as well, so our small startup team set out to create a personalized, micro-learning app to help people learn something new + relevant in just a couple minutes each day. We called it an AI leadership coach.

We launched it in 2020 and things were going great, until we started running into some major issues:

We had built at a furious pace just to get the app out in the world and see if people wanted it at all, but we piled up tech debt in order to move fast Because we had decided to prioritize new features over quality, we started getting a TON of bug reports and complaints about loading times. We knew we were making a tradeoff, but the impact on user experience escalated faster than we initially expected. Every time we fixed one bug, we introduced new ones, so fixing what seemed like a simple issue would end up being a major rabbit hole

We realized at some point that we weren’t realistically going to be able to develop on top of what we had built (at least not as quickly as we wanted), and made a tough decision to re-write the app entirely, even though we knew that this is the kind of project many teams have started but few actually finish.

While we managed to pull it off, it took longer than we initially hoped. In total, it took over 6 months (though we were also maintaining the “old” app). We ended up moving away from SwiftUI and Combine to instead go with UIKit and RxSwift. We also decided to build a backend API and moved away from using Firestore directly as well.

I don’t think I would advise others to go down this path, but I’m happy to say we shipped the new app, and so far: our speed of development has increased massively - we’re now shipping ~once a week or so and able to work on meaningful features. Crashes and bug reports are way down, as are loading times.

Curious to hear what HN thinks of the new app, and any questions about the process!

tillk2• 4 years ago

Hey — I am part of this journey and currently support the Bunch team in the role of the CTO. If anyone has questions, I am happy to answer them. :)

BorisBorisov91• 4 years ago

That's cool :-)

What is your tech stack now?

Do you already have ideas on how to evolve your tech stack when introducing the Android version in the future?

tillk2• 4 years ago

Current tech stack is:

The iOS-Frontend is UIKit and RxSwift. The backend is pretty lean — TypeScript, Firestore with the beginnings of PostgreSQL (with Prisma!). The recommender piece for the daily tips is Python. We also use cloud functions to run async updates (e.g. for daily updates and migrations).

Otherwise — lots of hosted services in the mix (Brave, Circle/Github, HoneyComb to name a few).

As for the future, we're exploring Flutter and a few other options to provide different experiences.

chickPEAsant2• 4 years ago

Where does the content in the app come from?

darjagutnick2• 4 years ago

Heya! We have a couple of different sources. In the beginning, our team was summarizing the best resources that we found online to address common challenges that users reported (and linking to the full version).

These days, we're also collaborating directly with coaches and other contributors from our community. We've found that the "magic" of Bunch comes from the little a-ha moments you get from reading new or different perspectives on a topic, so we try and create those moments.

chickPEAsant2• 4 years ago

Awesome, thanks!

superzadeh• 4 years ago

nice! I’ve been using this app for a while, feels much smoother now. I’m using it a lot now on M1 mac as well, and pass it to all my team leads that I want to grow into Engineering Managers, super helpful to share mental models and explain how to give feedback

aghillo• 4 years ago

Super good first impressions and a very stylish app. Really looking to working with this over the next few weeks.

Show HN: Professional growth in 2 min a day [total rebuild of iOS app]

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