Baker Health
Telemedicine app · iOS, Android, web · New York and New Jersey
Baker Health is a New York-based healthcare provider, offering primary and pediatric care in New York and New Jersey. At Speer I worked on its app as a developer and later led it. I also led its move to React Native and set up the new project from scratch.
Context
I was responsible for the app's architecture and technical decisions, and for the API, the database design and the releases. I kept writing code too, reviewed the team's pull requests and helped junior developers when they got stuck.
Real-time chat is one of the app's key features. And with patient data, HIPAA came up in almost every design discussion.
Constraint
The chat runs on Stream Chat, a hosted service, and its rate limits depend on which plan you pay for. I wanted to stay on the plan we had.
The problem
Our chat was losing messages, but only sometimes.
It took us a while to find. In the end it was Stream Chat rate limiting our API calls.
What changed
Upgrading to their enterprise plan would have fixed it. I didn't want to pay for that just for one bug, so we cut down our API calls until we stayed under the limit.
I also set up Loki, so problems like this show up in the logs first.
- Under the limit
- Over the limit, message lost
Result
We fixed it without changing plans.
No lost messages after that.