Etch is a social travel platform: it helps people discover destinations and activities, see where their friends have travelled, build custom itineraries collaboratively and share whole trips or single places. CodigoDelSur took it over as a half-finished product from another team, rebuilt it across the stack, and published it to the App Store five months later.
Etch arrived with the shape of an app and none of the reliability of one. Trip planning is deceptively heavy underneath: places have to come from a real geographic dataset rather than a list, itineraries are collaborative documents several people edit at once, and chat and sharing have to work between travel companions in different time zones and frequently offline. Inheriting a codebase in that state makes the first decision the hardest: what to keep.
CodigoDelSur rebuilt Etch across the stack. The backend was built in Python and Django on AWS with the infrastructure defined in Terraform, so environments were reproducible rather than hand-configured, which is usually the first thing missing in a rescued project. Destination data came from Google Places and the chat layer from Sendbird, under an iOS app for discovery, itineraries and sharing. Stack: Python, Django, AWS, Terraform, Google Places, Sendbird, iOS.
A half-finished third-party product was rebuilt and published to the App Store five months after CodigoDelSur took it over. Frontend and backend were both rebuilt, with infrastructure defined in Terraform, and collaborative itineraries, discovery and social sharing were all delivered in one release.
