Road Scholar

Context

Designed for educational travelers, Road Scholar lets you connect with fellow explorers, share your experiences, and stay updated on past, upcoming and current trips.

The problem

The app had been built by less experienced developers. It had many bugs and needed a lot of polish, and the previous senior engineer became unavailable.

My role

I stepped in to lead the project, with one junior developer on the team. In sprint planning I took the complex tasks and the junior took the simpler ones. I made the architecture, backend API and UI decisions, and I was the main contact with the client.

Bugs I fixed

• Emojis and some special characters didn’t work in the social feed.
• After switching accounts, users kept receiving push notifications for the previous account.
• UI broke on small devices.
• Images and videos showed the wrong size and quality.
• Uploading long or high-quality videos crashed the app.

How we worked

We worked in Scrum. We met with the client almost every week to show progress and talk through blockers and risks, and we shipped regular builds for client acceptance testing so they could test and send feedback.

Outcome

The app launched, and we keep improving it.