Under the Hood of Scalable Apps

Brandon Tram (btram@coursera.org)Michelle Wong (mwong@coursera.org)

• University of Waterloo

• Co-op program

• Mobile - iOS & Android

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Mobile @ Coursera

What about scaling up?Forget scale

SHIP IT

Coursera iOS 1.0

Scaling upHow do we

measure growth?

This legacy code is not so great…

What about adding X & Y?

Test? Test? Test?

New Methodologies

“86% of time is spent using apps, 14% is spent browsing”

Feature Modules

What about integrating large features?

Coursera Debug Tools

Activating Tweaks

• Employee verification

• Volume key

• Overlay icon

• Secret gesture

Tweaks: Other Examples

• Client-side

• FB Tweaks

• Remote

• GroundControl

• Rollout.io

Tweaks Challenges

• Defining a useable interface

• Activation method

• Changing app state at runtime

How do we measure growth?

Analytics Lifecycle

Eventing Platform

PartnersProduct Team

Analytics Team

Event: pause_clicked

Properties: - video id - video time - play back rate - subtitle language - volume

Metadata: - timestamp - app version - os version - etc

• 26% of all video views

• 6.5 million views

Mobile Metrics

60%14%

26%

iOS Android Web

Debug X-Ray

• Event key, metadata filtering

• Send to email, Google Drive

• Tweaks-enabled

Dispatch Sources

Dispatch Sources

Analytics Challenges

Takeaways

• You have a great app in production or market

• Scale team: feature flagging

• Scale user growth: accurate analytics tracking

Thank You!

btram@coursera.orgmwong@coursera.org