Badi, a simple and practical app, connects tenants and their vacant rooms with people searching for just that: rooms for rent in a shared space. Available on the GooglePlay and iTunes, Badi offers an intelligent match between supply and demand in which every party wins. Badi now is on TV with a spot and the app was developed by Alberto Betalla, ex-Lead Instructor at Ironhack Barcelona, and two Ironhackers, David Santos and Oriol Bellido.
David and Oriol completed Ironhack’s Web Development Bootcamp in Barcelona and won the inaugural HackShow at the Barcelona campus. Realizing the benefits of teamwork, the two collaborated on their final project: Myfridge. Myfridge is an app focused on managing the “entrance and exit” of food into a freezer, digitalizing the dates on the receipts for when the food was purchased. For the development of this app, they relied on the collaboration of Ulabox, which gave them access to their API.
We interviewed these awesome Ironhackers to learn more about their new app:
What have you liked most about the process of developing Badi?
Alberto: The challenge! The startup pace is very quick and is very different from that at larger companies. In the case of Badi, in less than a year, we managed to get an investment of more than 1 million euros and an advertising campaign in the major national TV channels. The TV campaign that began in late August involved a total redesign of the cloud and software architecture to support a growing number of users. For this reason, for the launch on TV, we decided to develop from scratch a new API and a new database in just two months. We slept (very) little, but we did it, and it gives a lot of satisfaction to see that we now have over 100,000 users and our backend is still working very well.
Oriol: Fully developing the backend of Badi from scratch has been a great challenge for a novice programmer like me. You learn at a crazy fast pace, just like at Ironhack, and we appreciate that the demanding nature of the course prepared us to deal with the frenzy. As explained our fearless leader, we’ve devoted many hours to Badi… but we’ve enjoyed them all… To be brief: It’s been an intense, exciting and, luckily, tremendously rewarding experience.
David: On a purely technical level, the best part was being able to start part of the project from scratch, and making all of the decisions regarding the technology stack, style, development flow, services, etc., together.
On the other hand, it was also great to see that that all work had an immediate impact, together with visibility of starting a TV campaign. To find these two points simultaneously isn’t easy, and I feel very fortunate to be experiencing this phase of company growth.
What do you like most about working together on Badi?
Alberto: The best part of working at Badi is that you’re never bored. It seems ironic to say this, but those of us that work in technology know that the worst enemy is boredom. We’re not scared to face unexpected challenges or constantly bet on new technologies; that’s actually what we’re passionate about and what we search for. At Badi, we have a development roadmap that will give us new opportunities and adventures in the short and long term; and stimulates our curiosity daily. We are going to introduce a lot of new things in our app in the next few months. It’s going to be a lot of fun!
Oriol: Comradeship, passion, and guaranteed laughs. And a top-notch tech team!
David: When you start at a new company, you always have doubts about what you’ll find, about whether everything they’ve told you about the job is true, about how your coworkers will be. But joining Badi was totally different. I already knew Oriol really well, he was a fellow student in my Ironhack cohort and my project partner, and Alberto was our Lead Instructor, so I knew what I was signing up for, and I knew I was going to like it.
What do you like most about Ironhack?
Alberto: Talking about technology specifically, Ironhack played a fundamental role in the launching of our API, which coincided with our TV campaign. In fact, the in-house Badi team right now is 100% made up of Ironhackers.
Ironhack allowed us to find each other and learn together through modern educational paradigms like “learn by doing.” Second, the fact that we were part of the Ironhack community gave us the huge advantage of getting to know wonderful colleagues that work in local and international companies. The community members are available to offer quick suggestions and advice, and we took took advantage of their connections many times in the last couple of months to get an outside opinion. Many of those connections are also professors or mentors in the Ironhack bootcamps, like Tair of Dockbit who helped us out these past couple of months to build out a cloud infrastructure that will make the competition jealous
Oriol: Without any doubt, the people. The community at Ironhack is spectacular. It’s a fantastic group of humans with a lot of drive to learn and never stop.
I want to emphasize that Ironhack doesn’t just offer an amazing education experience. In fact, a big part of the value comes from the valuable connections that it makes available to you from day one, which any smart future alumni will take the maximum advantage of.
David: It’s cheesy but true: it’s the people. The Ironhack community is incredible. In the end, you realize that a lot of the tech community in Barcelona has passed through here or come to learn more, attend talks, workshops… So, once you’ve done Ironhack, it’s hard to leave it. There’s always more to learn.
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Through our Alumni Program, we like to keep in touch with our talented coders and follow the development of successful apps like Badi, which show that we really are creating “the next generation of digital builders.” Keep coding David and Oriol!
