Marine Snow

Description

Marine Snow is a vertical social network + music streaming platform for music connoisseurs. It allows discovering indie music not through track lists and playlists, but in a game-like manner with content unlocking (both music and social network elements (posts like on reddit, audio chat rooms)). Subscriptions have access to the app, in-app activity unlocks content.

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Project Background

• Marine Snow founder had a lot of features in mind for his iOS mobile application to implement. Client’s team was composed of a CTO, 2 part-time back-end engineers, a designer and a product owner all working part-time.
• The team was eager to experiment with the app's functionality to find the best way of engaging users with an emphasis on gamification.
• Initially, the client was trying to implement an audio communication feature that would allow users to create and/or enter an audio room, record audio messages, upload them, and listen to messages that other users have recorded. The UI should have responded in real-time as new users interacted within the room — entering or leaving it, creating or deleting messages, etc. Users should have been able to record and listen to audio messages whenever they choose.

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Objectives

• Create new infrastructure to handle audio rooms and large quantities of users
• Implement functionality that allows recording of and listening to audio messages
• Implement UX for iOS App according to product documents and design specs
• Test different UI solutions for better user experience
• Implement gamification features with rich audiovisual component to increase user engagement with the app
• Integrate in-app analytics to understand user behavior

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Tech Stack

React Native + native Swift modules + Unity for game-dev elements only for iOS, Python + Django, AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, Kubernetes, Grafana, Mixpannel for Analytics

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Key features

1. Implemented many features from scratch:
   
   • Reddit-like in-app user posts tab
   • Round Table
   • Achievements Page
   • Ecosystem
   • Comments
   • New Profiles
   • Native iOS player integration
2. Profound UI solutions:
   
   • Advance animations
   • App Redesign
   • Custom views similar to apple watch dashboard
3. Gamification features for:
   
   • Home Page
   • Rewards system
4. Integrate in-app analytics
5. Setup of Project Infrastructure
   
   • Subnets with Internet Gateways for security and stability
   • Load Balancer Application
   • WireGuard VPN tunnel
   • Jenkins - CI/CD
   • Terraform - “Infrastructure as code” 
   • Grafana for application metrics monitoring

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Key Solutions

• Implemented many features from scratch
  
  • Reddit-like in-app user posts tab
  • Round Table - FIFO-like audio messages chat rooms themed by topic. We used SendBird for chat.
  • Achievements Page - Freeform-like Canvas feature to promote user’s in-app achievements (Orbs) in front of other users
  • Ecosystem - dynamic leaderboard page with Marquee of the most active users
  • Comments feature for posts and music with preview of Reddit links
  • Re-invented Profile feature by adding avatars collection, added musical compositions and adding possibility to review other Profiles
  • Native iOS player integration, that also allowed to use the app in the lock mode

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• Profound UI solutions:
  
  • Advance animations based on React Native reanimate library for Round Table and Canvas features
  • Many rounds of redesign campaigns of the app
  • Developed custom views similar to apple watch dashboard and animated backgrounds with native iOS code.

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• Gamification features for:
  
  • Home Page in Advent calendar style with musical rewards and user levels
  • Rewards system for comments, posts creation, likes, and adding music

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• Integrate in-app analytics to understand user behavior:‍
  
  • We’ve integrated Mixpannel to understand how user behaves in application, collecting metrics and testing hypothesis

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• Setup of project infrastructure:
  
  • Our DevOps has set up 8 subnets (4 for production and 4 for development - each set of 2 public + 2 private) with Internet Gateways (to communicate with the internet) for project servers to improve fault tolerance and security of the infrastructure.
  • We’ve set up a Load Balancer Application to increase servers survivability and availability that also monitors the health of its registered targets and ensures that it routes traffic only to healthy targets.
  • To control inbound and outbound traffic this infrastructure uses security groups.
  • WireGuard VPN is used as a VPN tunnel to get into the internal network of project infrastructure including Amazon RDS database.
  • To provide continuous integration functionality and remove human participation in many tasks we’ve used Jenkins for CI/CD and Terraform for the “Infrastructure as code”.
  • Kubernetes has been used for contained applications deployment automation, scaling, and coordination in a cluster. We’ve chosen Grafana for application metrics monitoring.

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