The Talk

The Age of Coronavirus hit Omnyway hard. Our customer base, brick and mortar luxury retailers, shutdown as their shoppers were not shopping. Our biz folks came up with a great idea to restore our customer’s business and our own: A Live Streaming Commerce Platform. Retailers would be able to produce live streaming events from their stores to their cliental. The platform would enable fulfilment via pickup or shipping, all using a dashboard webapp in the stores. The cliental would be able to view events and make immediate purchases and payment thru a webapp on their phones, tablets or PCs.

All we would have to do is create sophisticated Dashboard and Mobile First webapps with scalable live streaming, chatting, product presentation / selection and payment from scratch with a team of 5 backend Clojure devs and 2 qa folks before we run out of our very limited cash runway. Oh and none of us have much experience with frontend or live streaming development.

Less than 4 months later we had our first beta customers running events and making sales. Clojure / Clojurescript, a seasoned team and AWS Amplify / AppSync were the combination of ingredients enabling our technical success.

We will present the tools and techniques we used and developed to build a sophisticated frontend driven set of webapps. As well as much how we climbed the learning curve of UI frontends and the AWS Amplify backends.