What Are Viget Developers Building Right Now?

I sat down with our Development Director, David, last week to talk about Viget’s Development team, what they are working on, and how we should grow over the next 6 months. I left the conversation inspired.

The purpose of this article is to provide a snapshot of what the Viget Dev team is currently working on. Hopefully, you’ll find this list as inspiring as I did -- there is a huge range of scope, duration, team size, technology, and client type. If you think you’d enjoy contributing to these types of projects, I hope you’ll consider applying to work with us or at least introducing yourself so we can keep in touch long-term.

Here’s a quick rundown of the dev work we’ve done this quarter (January - March, 2018).

1. We just started a quick, two-week project to build a small app with a React front-end and Rails back-end. It’s a fast paced, collaborative project with two Devs and a UX Designer. This is part of an ongoing engagement we have with a tech-focused venture capital firm. The developers on this project have been writing Go, React, and Ruby.
2. We’re currently adding a new product to the custom content management and e-commerce platform we built previously for Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). This is a multi-year relationship, and the Viget team has spanned all disciplines (design, UX, data, backend dev, front-end dev). The developers on this project are writing Ruby.
3. We recently completed what we affectionately called the “4 weeks, 3 apps” project. Working closely with a Y-Combinator funded start-up, we built a set of apps that redefine in-store shopping. The client team brought machine learning expertise, and we brought web / mobile development expertise. The Viget team included four developers and one product designer. Among other things, they used React Native with custom Java code to do some native integration with Square. This project was exciting, energizing, and -- let’s be honest -- exhausting. (In a good way!)
4. We are working with long-time client Privia Medical Group on several virtual visit and virtual urgent care initiatives launching in 2018. The initial web app version of this software was built with a React front-end and a Ruby on Rails backend, with Vidyo powering the video conferencing. Now, a team of three Viget developers + three client developers are tackling an Electron desktop app for doctors, as well as iOS and Android native mobile versions for patients, which means Nate gets to use Kotlin. He is very excited about that.
5. Long-time client US News has a ton of cool data, and we’ve worked with them to build beautiful, easy to use web front-ends to share that data with readers.  Most recently, we’ve been helping to build one of their “Best Of” sites. The developers on this work are writing React and Python.
6. We’re working on a content and e-commerce site for a large medical supply company. The client was enthusiastic about using Craft, but also required some custom features. Working closely with our product and visual designers, we have a front-end developer building this site with Craft and a back-end developer writing custom Craft plug-ins in PHP.
7. A forward-thinking investment strategy firm hired us to overhaul the way they provide information to the global investment community. We created several interactive data visualization dashboards, including this one that displays historical and expected returns of simulated portfolios based on different investment methodologies. The team has been doing this work in React.
8. We recently wrapped our first project with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute,  a non-profit that empowers consumer product manufacturers to have a positive impact on the environment. We built a pathway tool for early-stage material health innovators, which has an Elixir backend and React front-end, to give users the ability to create an inventory of chemicals and screen them against lists of known hazards in a 3rd-party database. Looking ahead, we’ll be building out their suite of consumer and internal-facing tools, mostly in Elixir.
9. Internally, we've invested a big chunk of time this quarter on expanding our DevOps expertise. We're putting processes in place to better provision, configure, manage, and troubleshoot servers for our clients. Using Ansible, we're building a set of tools to more easily configure servers and to provide clients with their infrastructure as a code deliverable. Our most recent DevOps challenge is working with a Windows-only client team to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux and a custom Ansible-based tool to automatically configure a development environment so they can develop a Rails application on their Windows machines.

The next three months (and beyond!) are shaping up to be as busy, varied, and challenging as the last three, which is why we are looking to grow the team. We’re hoping to hear from people who love not only building software, but learning new languages, and sharing their knowledge along the way.

I’d love to tell you more about these projects and how our dev team collaborates with the other disciplines at Viget. Please don't hesitate to get in touch!