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explore.org
How we achieved a complete reimagining and rebuild of the entire explore.org application ecosystem, the singular destination for watching live streamed nature cams online.
The Client
explore is a multimedia organization that documents leaders around the world who have devoted their lives to extraordinary causes. Both educational and inspirational, explore creates a portal into the soul of humanity by championing the selfless acts of others. explore has over 250 cameras installed in locations all over the world that are broadcast to the platform 24 hours a day, visited by millions of users each month. explore needed to completely rebuild their web application and mobile applications, moving from their old legacy architecture and user experience to a brand new platform, completely redesigned from the inside and out.
The Challenge
The monumental task of rebuilding the entire ecosystem that explore.org had been running for close to a decade required a team that was well versed in all aspects of application development and delivery. From understanding the existing architecture and user experience, to completely redesigning the infrastructure and tech stack, the challenge was large in scope and delicate in nature. The new platform would give die hard fans of the platform an improved experience, while being able to attract new users from around the world.
The Solution
We meticulously analyzed the existing tech stack and user experience and began drafting a scope of work that would satisfy the vast requirements of the updated platform. We decided to begin by refactoring the tech stack and migrating from an old and slow platform to a modernized, microservice based stack. We began with building a brand new RESTful API and migrating the website to a modernized ReactJS single page web app. We then helped modernize the streaming infrastructure, running on AWS, and updated the mobile applications by building them from scratch using React Native. The process was long, arduous, and challenging, but took every little bit of knowhow to complete and we achieved remarkable results. The platform is now scalable, performant, and effortless to continue building upon.
Services We Provided
+ Web App Engineering
+ Mobile App Engineering
+ Content Management System
+ App Store Delivery
Platforms
+ Web
+ Mobile
Tech Stack
+ PHP
+ Laravel
+ Python
+ Django
+ React Native
+ ReactJS
+ RESTful API
+ MySQL
+ Docker
+ Kubernetes
+ ElasticSearch
+ AWS
+ Unit Testing
+ CI/CD
We rebuilt the entire tech stack for millions of users.
Millions of users from all over the globe visit explore.org every month. The rollout of the updated suite of apps was taken in phases, and included constant feedback from the dedicated community of viewers and volunteers. Each step of the way, we worked closely with the stakeholders and users to craft a solution that met their growing needs, while continuing to optimize the performance and experience for all.
Constructing a robust management system was half the battle.
explore.org is a multimedia company at its core. Therefore, creating optimized streaming infrastructure and a practical custom management portal for administrators was paramount. We helped build scalable, cost effective infrastructure to manage the hundreds of always-on camera streams, and built an intuitive backend management portal for administrators to manage all of the platform content.
