Airfarm — Farmers for Farmers

There are in general plenty of agricultural spheres where internet technologies are used such as:

• field monitoring;
• management and optimization;
• water usage;
• IOT for various devices;
• etc.

Our client-defined informational support and community formation to be most valuable.

Airfarm has now been able to win the first investors in a seed financing round. The company raised $ 2.8 million from donors in the United States, among others.

Process

We had a business interview with our customer and found out the essence of the project, the potential user segments, the profit each segment would gain from a certain part of the app functionality. Besides, we discussed the project plan and the expectations the client had from us as a dedicated development team.

To describe the project in more detail we used job stories since such an approach perfectly fits long-term development projects and allows us to consider various possible ways of realization.

We prepared a clickable design mockup of the interface.

Stfalcon was a part of the clients team and provided development support in:

• UX design services;
• UI design services;
• Backend, Frontend, iOS, and Android development services;
• manual testing.

Solution

The application provides the users with the opportunity to look through materials chosen according to the users’ preferences in a convenient way.

The users can leave comments on articles, follow authors and their channels.

The data is stored in the frontend, so they can be used offline as well, which is extremely convenient for the farmers.

Development

Backend

The backend was developed from scratch on NodeJs Express. We have thought through all the aspects of business logic and further project growth perspectives. To maintain the high data transmission rate, fault tolerance and scalability of the project were created on a microservice architecture. Ingress is being used as a load balancer to provide fast request coordination to various microservices.

Every microservice is designed for a particular task according to the pattern of Controller-Repository-Model. The general code: helper features and basic classes are realized in separate npm packages, which are operated by us through Lerna. Bull queue controls that all the articles are published on time.

Frontend

We used all the innovative opportunities of MongoDb, to provide the content to the users even faster: simple and compound indices, well-optimized aggregations and flexible databases.

For this project, we used the lightweight framework VueJs with the associated plugins for the set tasks realization. The meta-framework NuxtJs, based on VueJs and NodeJs, was used as well. We realized a universal application with the help of it. The initial web-page rendering is realized on the server, it decreases the page loading time and positively influences its SEO.