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I joined Wyzetalk as one of the developers brought in to build the next generation of applications for the business. Part of this process was to replace the existing AngularJS Config and Ionic mobile applications with more modern alternatives.

While React was the preferred tool for both of these, we’ve only ended up using it for the CMS, which manages the setup and content population of these white label applications.

I was initially planning on using React for the mobile application development as well, but after a few research and development projects testing out the newest Ionic, React Native, Native Script, Flutter and a few others, Flutter came out ahead as the best and most viable option to meet all the business and development requirements.

A large amount of my time was spent implementing new automated processes and improving the existing ones. I simplified the CMS builds by switching to Webpack and deployments with Docker, which eased the transition from Bitbucket to Azure for CI.

Automating the white-labeling of the mobile apps presented its own challenges, which I opted to solve with a NodeJS command line script fed with client-specific parameters. This script would handle theming, localization and feature toggling, as well as uploading to the targeted App Stores using Fastlane in under 5 minutes. This process used to be very manual and take hours, so here we observed a massive improvement.

As we had a broad team working on a mix of different operating systems (MacOS, linux, windows) our onboarding process was quite lengthy. I improved this by setting up a complete development environment as a collection of docker containers and a docker-compose config, using an NGINX reverse proxy and mongo container to replace their locally installed counterparts. This condensed our entire development environment into a single clone command.