}
Client: Airware
Airware, a drone startup funded by Y Combinator & Andreesen Horowitz, needed help building out a key part of their “drone operating system”: the Ground Control System (GCS) that customers use to control their drones.
Airware’s GCS is an advanced drone flight-planning, execution, and data-gathering app that operates in the field on a mobile PC.
Airware had achieved some initial product-market fit and was in the classic growth-phase startup scenario: too much to do and too little time to do it.
Airware needed help building out the GCS photo survey features. They tapped us for our deep engineering experience building complex, highly-polished enterprise applications.
Drone photo surveys are expensive, time-consuming, painstaking labor.
It’s difficult enough just getting to a site to run a drone mission, let alone operating a computer & autonomous flying robot operated by complex cloud-connected software.
In these challenging conditions, the GCS simply must work. Multiple points of failure are unavoidable, so every effort is taken to compensate for problems.
To add to our challenges, real customers would be using the features we developed in the field shortly after we shipped them. We factored all of this into our approach.
This was a fast-paced project with many unknowns.
Our experience of embedding in diverse software engineering teams helped us get moving quickly. We ramped up fast, arranged meetings with key managers & engineers, gathered requirements, asked the right questions, pushed for clarity, and delivered.
We architected our code for stability above all else. To save time and make the UX of the new features consistent, we created an abstraction around one of Airware’s existing, battle-tested components. This approach not only shaved weeks off development (and months of future maintenance), it greatly reduced the QA surface area & cognitive overhead.
Our code was written for easy hand-off. We wrote code that looks, feels, and performs exactly like the existing codebase – matching Airware’s existing code style, abstractions, architecture, etc. as closely as possible.
This was exactly the kind of complex software project we love working on from time to time. The challenges were an excellent proving ground for strategies & tactics we’ve developed over years of experience working with large tech companies and startups.
The talent on Airware’s team was unparalleled. We feel lucky to have the chance to work with so many talented, hard-working professionals.