Rewriting a Bus Detective: a real time app case study

Bus Detective is a mobile app to track the location of your bus based on "real time" updates from the metro system. After a few years in production, it was starting to show it's age and become difficult to support. Recently, we decided to rewrite Bus Detective using Elixir and Web Components. In this presentation we'll share what we learned along the way. We'll talk about the problems that led us to want to rewrite Bus Detective, and how the rewrite solved these problems. We'll look at how leveraging the Elixir (and Erlang) ecosystem let us simplify our architecture and see substantial performance gains. We'll share how rewriting our front end code using Web Components let us shed large amounts of code and complexity while reducing external dependencies. We'll also discuss some UI challenges and solutions you might want to think about while building real time apps.