Spin

Spin is an electric bicycle-sharing and electric scooter-sharing company. It is based in San Francisco and was founded as a start-up in 2017, launching as a dockless bicycle-sharing system controlled by a mobile app for reservations.

Spin

We started working for Spin in 2017 when one of their engineering directors reached out to us for our Rails expertise. Joshua had been the first engineer at Basecamp, and he really valued both our expertise and our company culture.

Spin is a huge Rails monolith surrounded with a lot of other tools built with other languages more suited to do microservices or IoT solutions for their hardware setup.

We joined forces with Spin to help them to develop many applications. We started working on the core application from the get-go to help them ramp up their development pace.

Over the years, we expanded our impact within Spin by helping them in multiple fronts: building APIs, developing internal tools to automate processes, helping with the mobile apps and even going into Golang to build microservices for all their IoT devices (for instance, to develop the unlock e-scooter functionality).

MarsBased jumped right into a complicated, fast-past project with flair. Not only were they able to extend and refactor a hairy Rails codebase into clean and manageable modules. They quickly figured out how to integrate seamlessly into a team working in a tight 2-week sprint cycle, with a 9 hour time difference. I'd recommend them for any challenging Rails project.
Joshua Sierles
Joshua Sierles
Backend Lead @ Spin

Project tech stack

Ruby on Rails

Rails is a model–view–controller framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages.

React Native

Open-source UI framework used to develop multi-platform applications by enabling to use the React framework along with native platform capabilities.

Go

Statically typed, compiled high-level language, similar to C with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency

Apache Kafka

Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform, providing a unified, high-throughput, low-latency handling of real-time data.

Over the years, we have been working across timezones with their distributed team, mostly async. Spin is a company that values performance and productivity.

As a matter of fact, one of the company culture pillars at Spin is defaulting to trust, which blends it very well with an async-first all-remote model for distributed development teams.

We have seen Spin's sale to Ford Group in 2018 and then to TIER mobility in 2022 and today we have outlived two different CTOs, two CEOs and several VPs, as we have among the longest tenures inside the company.

This allowed us the right to be onboarding and training Spin's newest hires and be considered part of their core team even in their company off-sites.

One of the most complex aspects of this project was to be aware at all times that whatever change impacted thousands of e-scooters around the globe and that every solution we built had to scale from the get go to hundreds of thousands of simultaneous petitions with the lowest latency possible. Also, we pioneered the usage of Stimulus to build the internal administration panel for all of their systems.
Oriol Collell
Oriol Collell
Tech Lead @ MarsBased

Project wins

Deep integration

Since the beginning of the project, we were involved in many areas of the platform, thus giving us a thorough understanding of the company.

Long-term relationship

In a company with a high attrition in the tech team, we eventually became the most senior people in the project, training their new hires.

Core team

Because of our expertise and relation, we were considered part of their core team, unlike the rest of other agencies and contractors. Deeply grateful!

Time difference

Usually, a nine hour time difference is brutal. We made it work in our benefit, covering their off hours as if we were the night shift, all done async.