Challenge
A pain point for both team leaders and players is how to manage substitutions when someone on a team can’t make a game. In the current model, it’s up to the team captain to reach out to their network to find a substitute player, which can be both time consuming and stressful. Additionally, for some players, signing up for a full league season isn’t manageable; for people like parents with young children and professionals with busy schedules or frequent travel, a regular weekly time commitment may simply not be feasible. Fortunately for these team leaders and busy potential players, Volo has a new solution in the works: VoloPass, an option for players to subscribe to a pass that will allow them to sign up to play in games where a sub is needed, on an ad hoc basis. Team captains will be able to choose when to open up sub slots, giving them the flexibility to reach beyond their individual networks when a sub is needed for their team. Pass holders will then be able to browse available sub slots when they do happen to be free, whether in their home city or in a city they may be visiting, opening up play to participants who need more flexibility in scheduling. Volo reached out to SmartLogic to build the infrastructure to support this new feature; their internal development team is relatively small, and they did not have the staff to build it themselves on their desired timeline. Volo had previously engaged SmartLogic for a code audit, in the summer of 2019, prior to acquiring the codebase of a piece of software that they had been using internally, and Volo’s founder Giovanni Marcantoni was familiar with SmartLogic from the Baltimore entrepreneurial community.
Solution
Volo’s existing codebase is a NodeJS monolith with MongoDB and GraphQL on the database side. For a number of reasons including performance optimization and future scale, the API we built for them is a standalone microservice built in Elixir Phoenix with a PostgreSQL database. This development project focused exclusively on building the API to support the new membership model, and included Stripe integration for payments as well as the data handling for the marketplace for team substitutes. Our team used the Absinthe GraphQL framework and built an updated driver to communicate with Volo’s MongoDB instance; internally, the API uses Ecto, a database wrapper and secure query generator for Elixir. Our team also implemented a data loader interface in Absinthe as part of the API development. One of the project challenges was demonstrating the new API’s capabilities to business stakeholders at Volo. The project was split into two pieces in part to help manage costs during the pandemic; the internal development team at Volo was tasked with building the front end, but their timeline was offset from our development team’s. In order to more easily demonstrate the API’s functionality to stakeholders at Volo before the front end had been built, our team created a small interactive API documentation app using React and GraphQL so that the business users could see the data loading and transformation in real time and manipulate it themselves directly.
Results
A core part of Volo’s business is creating opportunities for interaction and social collision — increasing the chances of people meeting whose paths might not normally cross. Players in a league meet and interact, and players who volunteer meet and connect with neighborhood kids. The pass membership and substitution opportunities provide yet another pathway for people to meet and connect across a variety of social boundaries, at home and on the road. Though the API development at this point is complete, Volo has not yet been able to test the new functionality at scale due to the global pandemic. The service is currently in beta testing with a small pool of users, and Volo is aiming to release the service more widely in Spring 2021. The API SmartLogic built will support a recurring revenue stream for Volo and provide usability improvements for their existing customers while also expanding their potential customer base.
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