Projects: My Mixtapez
My Mixtapez is a music streaming, video, and news app that serves a growing and dedicated community of rap and hip hop lovers. At Honeycomb Labs, we worked with them to streamline their development process, pay down considerable technical debt, and set an extensible foundation for continuing growth.
Throughout their first 8 years in operation, My Mixtapez had been rotating through teams of offshore engineers to execute the founders’ vision for the product and develop its core feature set. Each team that rolled on and off a project imposed its own set of preferred technologies, processes and design patterns so that over time, the platform had become a patchwork of services written in different languages and running on deprecated platforms. Increasingly, engineers’ time was consumed with learning a complex system of outdated technologies that were prone to breakage for unknown reasons. Development of new features slowed to a crawl.
Honeycomb Labs was engaged to rectify this state of affairs. We first identified a narrow set of technologies and platforms upon which My Mixtapez should be rebuilt and upgraded services using these technologies to modern versions that were more maintainable, scalable and allowed for continuous delivery. Obsolete or redundant services were eliminated while taking care to fold any critical functionality into the new system. The new system also lowered infrastructure costs by a third.
My Mixtapez engineers now release new features at a dramatically accelerated pace, at higher quality and with fewer bugs and less downtime. They’re able to support millions of users with a lean and productive team of 3 engineers. Honeycomb Labs continues to support the team in a fractional capacity to guide development and provide consistency in engineering and product leadership.