Who would think that there was a way to make using GPS fun? SCVNGR did, and now their gaming platform that encourages people to go places, do challenges, and earn points has millions of challenges and ecstatic users. SCVNGR is teaching the world how discover cool new places, do exciting new things, and share what they’re up to with the community
Mobile App Scalability
SCVNGR is a gaming platform and social experiment rolled into one. They wanted to build an extensible platform that enabled businesses and individuals around the world to create new locations, add challenges, and offer rewards – all accessible through a mobile client. Heroku enables SCVNGR to execute this vision at scale.
“For awhile Python was good to us, but it became a mess as it began to scale. We had to refactor the app to Ruby on Rails with Heroku. Now, the SCVNGR platform scales elastically as end users come and go.”
SCVNGR’S mobile application is a thin client for their gaming platform. This architecture enables them to iterate on the design and functionality of the app significantly faster than the traditional approach of building a heavyweight mobile client. They still use the mobile device to manage network connectivity, rectify GPS inaccuracies, and run local logic that has been optimized for performance. But even with that client logic, the bulk of their IP is within their platform, implemented with a set of REST APIs.
Triple the Releases with 95% Reduced Admin Time
SCVNGR’s management team is obsessed with minimizing the technical operations burden to their software developers. This focus allows their developers to maximize the time spent creating and optimizing features. When they launched their Python framework, the five person SCVNGR development team was doing one release every month and spending up to 20 hours per week on system administration. Since deploying their application to Heroku their team has increased to twelve people, they are deploying new production releases every week, and they are spending less than one hour of total team time on system administration. The net effect: a dramatic time savings for the SCVNGR engineering team and an increase in the iteration rate for their product.
“We love the New Relic add-on the most. We used to have a ton of errors and felt good because we didn’t know about them. Now we have fewer errors, but we can see all of them, and work hard to fix them.”
Managing Multiple Mobile Dev Environments
When SCVNGR first launched, they only had two environments: development and production. Now they have more than a dozen including environments for active development, development integration testing, QA, staging, and production. And they need those environments to be identical. Although creating new environments manually created similar systems, they were running on different hardware and not guaranteed to behave consistently. With Heroku, they set up new identical environments in minutes. This helps SCVNGR rapidly identify the root cause of problems and diagnosing issues that exist between similar, but different systems.
“With Heroku, we can create new environments in less time than it takes to tie our shoes.”
visit http://scvngr.com
About SCVNGR
SCVNGR is a game. And playing is easy. Go places. Do challenges. Earn points! That’s the core of it, but there’s a whole lot more. Discover cool new places. Do exciting new things. Share what you’re up to with your friends. Unlock badges (and even real world rewards) by doing quick, fun challenges at your favorite places as you go about your daily life.
SCVNGR is as much a game as it is a massive experiment in building a mobile game together. They are building the game layer on top of the world.
To make this happen, SCVNGR has designed an incredibly powerful (and easy to use) platform that means that whether you’re an individual player, a local store, a museum, a historic monument, a restaurant or anything in between, you can participate in building SCVNGR.
SCVNGR is the game layer on top of the world. To date, over 650+ institutions and tons more individuals are building on SCVNGR by adding fun, creative challenges to their favorite locations.