PepTalk

One of the priorities for our client was to make sure that PepTalk’s website is indexed in search engines and that the browsing experience is seamless. Our solution for this need was to use Gatsby.js, a React-based framework that helps us build static sites that load quickly and are efficient for search engine crawlers. The site’s smooth performance was further boosted by AWS Cloudfront—a fast content delivery network (CDN) solution.

Of course, the content visible on PepTalk’s website, e.g., the list of available experts, needs to be regularly updated. We used Contentful as the CMS so that the client can edit the site freely. We also figured out a way to ensure the latest version of the website is rendered as a static page. Using GraphQL, we gather the changes from Contentful and notify AWS via a webhook that a new landing page should be rendered. In a matter of minutes, a new version of the website is served as a static page.

One of the biggest challenges we had to solve was to manage the process of scheduling PepTalks. We needed to take many variables into account, including the expert’s availability and previous bookings as well as the possibility of the expert and the customer being in different time zones. The PepTalks themselves are operated via Twilio’s WebRTC-powered solution. This choice allowed us to configure different types of video calls (one-to-one, one-to-many) and create a custom interface.

Another feature that was important to our client was managing payments from the customer and expert’s payouts. In order to securely handle different currencies and cross-border transactions, we used Stripe’s payouts capabilities.

We’ve designed PepTalk’s infrastructure to be scalable, performant, and cost-effective using tools like AWS Fargate, the Serverless framework, and AWS Lambda. Epsagon enables us to keep track of what’s going in different elements of the architecture and monitor potential problems.

Final dash

Apptension’s team, consisting of frontend and backend developers as well as two QA specialists, ensured that PepTalk is properly tested and prepared for customers to use it. Testing video calls is challenging given the multitude of factors which must be considered, such as different devices, operating systems, and video calls’ features. Ultimately, both us and the client were very happy with the level of quality we were able to deliver.

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