Rapid Software Development in a Global Pandemic

The onset of COVID-19 in early 2020 signaled the beginning of a long battle for mankind against an enemy we cannot even see. The summer of 2021 saw the highest ever wave of infections in India. The healthcare systems were overwhelmed, hospital beds unavailable, oxygen running out everywhere. In horrific times like this, we saw the resilience of the human spirit.

In the midst of this, we envisioned a chat-based app that could connect patients and caregivers with medical volunteers from around India to help alleviate the load of an over burdened healthcare system. Traditionally building out an app like this would take a lot of time, which we didn't have.

Enter – Firebase! We went from locked designs to in-production in less than ten days. Leveraging Firebase's powerful products to help bootstrap the app (Umeed) not only helped us build out the app with hyper-velocity but also at zero cost from an infrastructure perspective.

Through this talk, we'll cover how we build this production-ready web app in under two weeks.

We would like to thank every remarkable person who helped make this project a success! In particular Dr. Mamta Swaroop of the Sadanah Foundation who led the initiative, Dr. Priyansh Shah of the World Youth Head Federation who brought on board medical volunteers from across the country and the super star developers from Archimydes and ThoughtWorks that made this app a reality in very short time!

This talk is brought to you by Archimydes, a Software Engineering Guild, focused on the ability of developers to Engage, Grow, and Earn. The Guild has been started by Accenture, IBM, and ThoughtWorks alumni and is focused on: 1) Decoupling income from geography 2) Nurturing the excellence of our craft