UB Tech Update - September

#UbTechUpdate for September

Hi all, Adi sk again with the tech update for September month.
You can catch the last edition here.

Admin Portal

1. In the previous month, we had implemented payout processing of our Employees' salary using RazorpayX, after witnessing how much time and effort it saves, we decided to work on the same for our Supplier payouts too. In our system, a Supplier or Milk Supplier is the Women's group or the Farmers' group procures milk from the Dairy Farmers for UB. We currently work with around 50 suppliers and settle their payments every 10 days. Previously this was tedious to double-check and initiate a transaction from our bank account, but now it's been automated and payouts can be processed in mere seconds. The implications of this seemingly small change are far-reaching, when we are able to process payouts like this, we could implement an on-demand system where Suppliers/Farmers can request a payout when they are in need of it.
2. In the previous edition, I had mentioned about migrating our Macro reporting to our own solution, one unintended positive consequence was that we could have close to 40% of our server resources on this change, that's a massive boost in performance for our other applications. This month I continued to fix a few use cases that I had not thought of previously, making the new reports more consistent.
3. As part of Delivery administration, we regularly look for better ways to organize our customers for easier delivery. This exercise often involves groups of customers being moved around. This was done manually by me previously so I had to come up with a better way, and give this tool to our Delivery managers so they can do this by themselves. So we developed a small utility within our portal to migrate groups of customers between different Dealerships.
4. Bharath our first tech recruit was given the task of updating some legacy code structuring to a better structure. This way he can go through the entire application and see how each part is connected to other parts.

Dealer App

1. As I had mentioned in the previous edition, I started rewriting our Dealership management app from the ground up, using Capacitor 4, Vue 3, and Tailwind 3. This rewrite has enabled us to experiment with a few design ideas that were not previous when we used Bootstrap 3. Finally, it's been completed and shipped to our Dealers. Redesigning is always a greatly gratifying exercise to undertake.

Dev Ops

1. We have been looking to migrate our Cloud setup to AWS for a while now. Some of AWS's products are really interesting and can add value to our Tech infrastructure. So as the first step towards getting our feet wet with AWS, I wanted to migrate less important applications and see how it performs. So I migrated web versions of our Customer facing and Dealer facing applications to AWS Amplify. Amplify provides build time and hosting space for web apps. These apps have been working better than expected, and another feature of this service is the ability to host multiple versions of the same app configured to different domain names, which makes deploying development, staging, and production variants easy.

Putting into words the work that's been done, makes me realize how much has been done over a month. But I'm still trying to get into the routine of publishing these regularly.

That's all for this edition of UbTechUpdate. If you would like to more about our system or have specific doubts, do let us know in the comments, we are always ready to help.

by Adi Sk, CTO of Uzhavarbumi