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Peek Inside the Tech Stack Behind Our Dashboard, Sundash

For the Tech Team at Sunday, the company’s in-house and external partner studios are direct clients. It means that the team’s primary goal is to provide these studios with advanced technological solutions that can make their game-producing (aka revenue-generating) efforts as efficient as possible. One of these solutions is Sundash, the one-stop solution for launching marketing campaigns and assessing game marketability in a simple, user-friendly way..

To create this and other in-house solutions, choosing the best tech stack is crucial, and that’s exactly what we’ll be discussing. But before we give you our tech stack example, let’s get an overview of the team’s workflow.

Sundash, the Tech Team’s Main Product 

Sundash has completely changed how our publishing managers and partner studios work, eliminating the need to juggle multiple spreadsheets and documents, along with multiple platforms like Facebook and JustTrack just to determine if a game prototype will be a success.

No more manually syncing data, and constantly switching between tabs to collect the much-needed results. Sundash brings all these platforms together in one easy-to-use space, making life much easier for game developers. Now, they can run marketing tests for mobile games directly via Sundash and conveniently view the results, too. How did we make it possible? The answer lies within the many talents of our Tech Team and their smart choice of the technology stack, which we’ll be covering next.

Tech Stack Used to Build Sundash 

Backend:

• PHP: The server-side language of Sundash’s backend tech stack that we chose because it allowed for faster development. 
• Lumen: A  lightweight PHP framework from Laravel used to handle the server-side logic of Sundash. We use Laravel’s Lumen because it’s an established framework with a large community of developers and good documentation – a smart choice for development speed and support if you ask us.
• MySQL and MongoDB: Database management systems we use for storing data for Sundash. We chose these for their flexibility when it comes to handling larger amounts of unstructured data efficiently.
• Redis: An in-memory data store used for caching frequently accessed data in a pre-formatted structure, improving Sundash’s performance. Due to its performance, Redis is a no-brainer for a web app tech stack that deals with diverse data from various sources that have to be unified.

Frontend:

• JavaScript/TypeScript: This one doesn’t require much explaining – it’s the programming language used as a base for Sundash’s frontend tech stack.
• React: A JavaScript library used to build the frontend of Sundash. We chose it mainly for its large community of developers and good documentation, that we can solve any code-related problems with.

Infrastructure: 

For the infrastructure of Sundash the team uses AWS (Amazon Web Services), chosen for its scalability, reliability, and security features. AWS allows the Tech Team to manage our servers with a couple of clicks, from setting up to scaling. Among others, they use the following AWS tech stack:

• EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): A cloud-based server service we use to run Sundash’s backend code.
• S3 (Simple Storage Service): A cloud-based object storage service that allows us to store files and data for Sundash.
• Cloudwatch: A cloud-based monitoring service we need to track the performance of Sundash’s infrastructure.

Not Without Challenges 

Essentially, Sundash gathers data from a wide range of sources – including Facebook, JustTrack, Unity, and more – and combines it into a single, comprehensive dashboard for our in-house and partner studios. But here’s the catch: each platform has its own limits and restrictions on data gathering. Facebook, for example, limits the amount of data that can be pulled over rolling timeframe. To work around this, the team had to get creative. To solve the issue that would otherwise prevent Sundash from functioning, the Tech Team developed a queuing system that breaks down data requests into smaller, more manageable portions, tracks quota usages, and queues further requests. Instead of trying to pull all the data at once, we now pull it in chunks, one by one, until we’ve collected all the data we need. It’s a bit like eating a giant pizza – you have to take it one slice at a time!

Of course, data isn’t just about gathering – it’s also about security. That’s why the team behind Sundash takes every precaution to protect the backend, from using secure frameworks like Lumen to leveraging the security features of AWS. 

Sundash’s Future: The Stack is Well-Suited for It 

The future of Sundash includes lots of plans for the project’s expansion, but the current tech stack is flexible enough to allow for all of them and more. One of the main focuses is to include social and ideation-focused features that allow users to generate ideas for new games, express their opinions and share knowledge. This will not only increase engagement and interaction within the Sundash community but will also provide valuable insights for future game development.

In addition to this, Sundash plans to revamp their entire front-end application in the next couple of months. This will make Sundash more user-friendly, intuitive, and solution-oriented with a whole new design. The aim is to create a scalable web application that can easily accommodate new features and updates in the future. With this revamp, Sundash will not only look more visually appealing but also provide an improved user experience.

Experience It Yourself 

Our Tech Team is constantly researching and experimenting with new technologies to help Sunday and its partners streamline the game-development process. If you’re a studio interested in trying Sundash for yourself, we encourage you to publish with Sunday and see the magic of our modern tech stack in action. And if you’re a tech enthusiast yourself, check out our open positions and join our team!