Hello and welcome to our first PickTrace engineering blog post! This will be where we post all of our technical challenges and insights that we encounter along the way while we create the best software for agriculture the world has ever seen (at least, that’s the plan!). 

To start, we’re a small team, taking on a big problem. PickTrace is what farms use to track the who, what, where, and when any piece of fruit was picked. We have an existing product that will struggle to scale, so rather than band-aid our way out of this, we’ve decided that now is the time to drop what we’re doing in the day-to-day and focus on truly fixing these problems before they’re too-big-to-fix. 

Currently, we’re putting significant resources into the development side for maintaining uptime; more so than the cost we’re putting into the infrastructure itself. Even though we’re cloud-based, we still require set up for each new customer. As said before, we’re a small team! This reality stretches our nimble team and makes it feel even smaller — not good!

We are going to fix this in the following ways:

• Transition from a single tenant to multi tenant application
• Shift from a monolithic approach to a microservices approach
• Amortize the load we’ll be expecting in the future
• Reduce costs on the maintenance side, so that we don’t need to invest so much into keeping our customers up

If we succeed at the above, every piece of fruit you buy at the store will have been tracked to that point by PickTrace. If we fail, there probably won’t be many blog posts after this one, but let’s be honest, we’re not going to fail. 

We’re excited to take on this challenge and hope you’ll join us on this journey, either by keeping up with our blog, or by signing on to join our team and help us in the fruit and veggie wars to come.