Click to view slideshow.
As Tim called out the other day, we recently went live with a brand new mobile experience for IMSA, and I had the privilege of leading the engineering team on the project here at IK. The scope and timeframe of the project were both ambitious: we delivered a brand-new, content-driven mobile app with live streaming audio and video, realtime in-race scoring results, custom push notifications and more, across all major platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows), with custom interfaces for both phone and tablet form factors – all in a development cycle of about twelve weeks. It goes without saying that the fantastic team of engineers here at IK are all rockstars, but without some cutting-edge development tools and great partnerships, this would have been impossible to get across the finish line on time:
- Xamarin allowed our team to utilize a shared codebase in a single language (C#, which we happen to love) across all of our target platforms, enabling massive code reuse and rapid development of (effectively) six different apps all at once.
- Working closely with the team at Xamarin enabled us to leverage Xamarin.Forms to unlock even further code-sharing than would have been otherwise possible, building whole sections of the presentation layer in a single, cross-platform XAML-based UI framework.
- On the server side, our partners at Microsoft’s continued world-class work on Azure made utilizing Mobile App Service (née Azure Mobile Services) a no-brainer. The ability to scale smoothly with live race-day traffic, the persistent uptime in the face of tens of thousands of concurrent users making millions of calls per day, and the ease of implementation across all three platforms, all combined to save us countless hours of development time versus a conventional DIY approach to the server layer.
- Last but not least, being able to leverage Visual Studio’s best-of-breed suite of developer tools was essential to the truly heroic amounts of productivity and output of our engineering team at crunch time. And Visual Studio Online enabled the Project Management team and myself to organize features and tasks, track bugs, and keep tabs on our progress throughout the hectic pace of a fast development cycle.
The final result of this marriage between cutting-edge cross-platform technology and an awesome team of developers is a brand new app experience that’s available on every major platform, phone or tablet, and this is just the beginning – we have lots of great new features in store for IMSA fans worldwide. I’ll be following up with a couple more technical posts about particular challenges we faced and how we overcame them, and be sure to check out the next IMSA event in Detroit the weekend of May 29-30; I know I’ll be streaming the live coverage from my phone!
