Building scalable infrastructure for electronic poll books

Challenges

KnowInk is a software company that provides electronic poll books and voting software to polling locations in more than 900 jurisdictions throughout 29 states. Recently named one of the fastest growing companies in St. Louis, KnowInk needed help building processes, completing arduous tasks and testing software in order to scale its application to connect more than 50,000 poll books to its server.

Senior Software Developer Daniel Errante says he turned to Binary Noggin because, “I knew they had done work in a lot of different languages and been successful at helping other companies scale, so I thought it would be nice to bring in a heavy hitter to help us with some of our scaling challenges.”

Solution

Binary Noggin used its expertise in agile development to improve communication and increase collaboration throughout the entire company. After establishing processes and procedures, the team analyzed the current data and did extensive research to create improvements. They also refined code using Elixir to reduce bottlenecks in the code base and improve load times.

Firm believers in test-driven development (TDD), Binary Noggin implemented a series of load tests to assess performance and ensure KnowInk’s network could support their clients’ poll books.

Results

With Binary Noggin’s assistance, KnowInk kept its application connected and secure throughout its national project. The application ran on 50,000 iPads and contributed to checking in around 30% of the total voting population nationwide.

Binary Noggin’s pair programming coaching helped employees improve their Ruby on Rails development skills and has given KnowInk’s developers the tools they need to accomplish future tasks.

“Binary Noggin was as integrated to my team as if they were on my team,” says Jim Mason, director of IT. “Watching them work helped me build my confidence in my team because I could see how they were working, how they troubleshoot and the processes they used.”