WebinarNinja Case Study
Meet your performance goals, and take your application from good to great
Experts on Hand
Bitovi has helped Angular clients across many industries improve performance and embolden engineers to do their best work, purely through our audit process.
THOROUGH AUDITING
Learn how Bitovi's Angular experts enabled WebinarNinja to directly achieve their goals
80
Billed Hours
Bitovi's Angular audits are quick and efficient. Our process allows our experts to get in and out, providing you audit results right when you need them.
23
Actionable Tasks
We're not just giving you more problems to think about, but providing suggestions for you to push your application forward into greatness.
5x
Increase In Messages Processed
Adoption of best practices and improvements in code increased performance throughout the application, especially in the Chat component which saw a 5x increase in messages processed per second during stress tests.
The Situation
WebinarNinja was, as CTO Taylor Dondich puts it, a victim of its own success. As remote work boomed, the browser-based webinar hosting service became more popular, and it started to get reports of a problem: webinars with more than 300 attendees were getting a terrible experience. The UI was locking up, the front end becoming unresponsive, which meant the attendees were looking at frozen screens and unusable messaging.
“We take these things very personally,” Taylor says. “We’re very customer driven, and we knew this was a problem we had to tackle right away.” The problem was, their internal team was struggling to identify the issues causing the UI to freeze. They eliminated several possibilities - it wasn’t the video delivery, the backend services appeared timely - but troubleshooting was taking too much time.
“I have full confidence in our engineers,” Taylor explains. “But when we need a second opinion, you go to the experts in the field. And when I started looking for firms that are experts in Angular, Bitovi came up time and again.”
The Challenge
While the WebinarNinja development team was able to reproduce the issue their users were experiencing, they weren’t able to diagnose what was likely causing it. The team needed someone with especial experience improving Angular performance to walk them through a comprehensive performance audit.
After the audit, the data needed to be reviewed and prioritized to speedily work through the most likely code implementations causing the performance issues. “Bitovi delivered this list of action items with a scoring system that clearly explained if we implement this, it’ll be this level of effort, and we’ll get this level of benefit,” says Taylor. Having Bitovi’s experience with identifying most likely causes ensured the teams didn’t waste time tackling issues that weren’t going to influence the main UI problem.
The most readily-identifiable issue was that a significant feature was causing heavy change detection execution. After Bitovi helped resolve that problem, another challenge came to the fore. “We started seeing a problem that wasn’t 100% related to our Angular codebase, but to the interaction with our backend system. And we wouldn’t have seen that bottleneck of our backend system unless that initial problem was resolved by Fábio and the team,” Taylor says.
The Process
Bitovi brought in Angular expert Fábio Englert Moutinho as the lead on this project. Fábio started with a comprehensive performance audit, and quickly identified some problematic code implementations that can slip by undetected until executed at scale. This cleared the field and made it easier to see less-evident issues. Fábio was then able to analyze the data thoroughly and create a plan that prioritized issues by difficulty, time to resolve, and likely results.
In this project, speed was of the essence, and WebinarNinja’s team was impressed with how quickly Fábio became immersed in the problem. “The ramp-up time with Bitovi was astounding,” Taylor says. “We were able to get started right away and have constant communication, and Bitovi was extremely responsive alongside our team.”
In one week, WebinarNinja was able to walk away with their first issue identified and a comprehensive plan for resolving it. By the second week, Bitovi had helped implement changes, refactored, discovered the secondary underlying issue, and delivered a more detailed plan of action.
Bitovi was also able to expand the skills of the WebinarNinja team during our consult. “We used the audit as a teaching approach to help the team with their best practices,” Fábio says. “Five best practices can be correct individually, but they can add up in ways that cause problems, and you really need the experience to be able to identify when that’s happening.”
Taylor agrees. “We have a senior Angular developer on staff who became a much better developer through working with Bitovi. And he came out of the experience extremely happy with the results.”
The Results
“After the Bitovi engagement, we feel dramatically more confident in our service delivery,” Taylor says. Previously, the system would become completely unusable for users’ browser sessions at 300 attendees. With the improvements Bitovi has been able to suggest, WebinarNinja is able to go well beyond 500 attendees, and has the resources to continue to improve its capacity.
Even better? They got their primary issues identified and on their way to being resolved in just two weeks.
Taylor is particularly impressed by the fast turnaround. “We wanted to solve the problem fast, of course, but we also wanted to be comprehensive. Bitovi helped us deliver that perfect balance of speed and confidence in the solution.” WebinarNinja is so pleased with the collaboration, in fact, that they intend to start their next engagement immediately.
