Engineering behind FastBeetle-a sustainable tech startup in Kashmir

Fastbeetle
4 min readOct 1, 2021

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On a journey to empower our people, to serve the underserved, we are building a last mile delivery network in our region. To reach the unreachable and trip around from anywhere to everywhere, we create and design the action-oriented structure. This is piled up as multiple platforms in the form of web and native mobile applications.

Starting with a little team of ours, we all felt connected to our mission of empowering people in our region and each little progress associated with it. This, apart from working towards perfection, inspired us to instil the spirit of Kashmir, in the UI of our mobile applications.

Screenshots: From our multiple apps

While our cross-platform multiple application designs appear simple to the human eyes, we have come a long way to build this whole structure from scratch and keep adding features and bringing optimisations. In order to scale up and meet day to day demands, we upgrade our native applications to bring convenience all along for the users; that include local businesses, consumers as well as our riders.

As we are in the initial phase of our growth journey, like all other startups, our platform is build such that offers a flexibility in our very own region, however the structure is developed so that can be revamped to meet the requirements for any other place outside our parent region. For now, we are arising as the sustainable tech startup in our domain because we focus on the stability of our tech architecture.

Tech Stack used by the beetles

Getting into the comprehensive visualisation of whole process wouldn’t be feasible in a single story, so let’s take it with our stack first in this one.

Overview

FastBeetle Mobile apps

  • Framework: Android, iOS
  • Languages : Swift, Java, Kotlin
  • Course and tracking: Github
  • Architectural patterns: MVVM, MVP & MVC
  • Third part API’s: Google maps and places, Razor pay

FastBeetle Backend

  • Language: Javascript
  • Backend: Node.js
  • Framework: Express.js
  • Hosting: AWS & Digital Ocean
  • Database: MySQL
  • Course and tracking: Github

FastBeetle Web

  • Engine: Hogan JS
  • Hosting: AWS & Digital Ocean
  • Course and tracking: Github

Briefing in a few highlights for understanding it better

Languages

While we made a start with Java for building our first mobile application in android for our customers, seeing the drift in android for the changes that are supported by Kotlin, we made a shift towards the same. To make our apps more expressive we incrementally used Kotlin in our code to get hold on much flexibility with the add on libraries from Kotlin and also to give our developer community the perks of boosting their productivity while maintaining the user-centric experience.

Steadily when we moved towards, building iOS application, we made use of the fastest growing language for the platform i.e. Swift. An open source language with flexibility through the support of dynamic libraries, with better performance due to the amount of speed through fastest algorithms, and with lesser coding efforts and huge stability owing to the safe platform reasons, made us choose Swift for our iOS framework.

Hugely used in U.S, node.js is the top most handler of multiple concurrent requests, and our whole backend is in node.js as we resonate our apps with Javascript. Javascript being the most convenient one for development, using it our developers make sure that their code is understandable to any other developer for future course.

Architectural Patterns

To manage the complexity in our multiple applications we use various architectures, MVP for our customer and merchant android, MVVM for our android rider and MVC for iOS applications. These patterns make sense with each of our applications individually and enables our engineers to focus on single implementation at a time.

Database

Being the most reliable and secure platform, we chose MySQL over any other database for its flexibility, high performance and scalability. MySQL makes sense to our requirements like transaction handling and money transfers besides other technical reasons.

Additionally, while Express framework brings robustness all along, hogan.js engine makes sure to captivate dynamism in our development.

We, in our infancy are trying to bring this complex structure together to make and break it simpler and convenient as the end product. There are challenges and we are learning and growing while overcoming them. Wish us luck.

Stay tuned, we will be sharing more about our engineering along with the reliability and security factors in our next tech blog.

Keep choosing us for fast and professional courier services

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Fastbeetle

We untangle your needs to knot the threads of orders into deliveries