Originally founded by Justin Hales in Newcastle in 2015, Camplify have grown to become Australia’s largest and most trusted van sharing platform with a global presence spanning New Zealand, UK and Spain.
Camplify have built their central application that manages vehicle owners, end users and provides administration functions for Camplifty staff around Ruby on Rails.
Camplify has grown rapidly from their starting days as a successful start-up. Within a few years they offered the service around Australia, then moving to key international locations, with a stock exchange listing in 2021.
Always looking at ways to grow and expand their team, Jonathan Milgate - Camplify CTO, found good software developers hard to find, and so required extra support and augmentation to his existing internal development team.
With this rapid expansion came the need to grow and expand their technology team. Jonathan Milgate, Camplify CTO, found good software developers hard to find, and so required extra support and augmentation to his existing internal development team.
"We have a great internal team. We are a startup - we have lots of crazy ideas and features we want to build. I was looking for some elasticity in the team; in next month I might have a huge amount of requirements to build, something new or to fix some bugs, or expand on an existing feature. Then in 3 months time from there I might not. So the ability to grow the team rather than just grow an external project, is really what I was looking for."
Jonathan Milgate, CTO
Camplify
Camplify approached reinteractive for several reasons:
“We wanted a partner who could provide agility and elasticity - a partner we could bring into the existing team to extend capabilities and integrate as a team member, to co-source with us, not out-source. I wanted to utilise my existing devs and build around them."
Jonathan Milgate, CTO
Camplify
Having a reinteractive developer come in and act as part of the team has been a great learning experience for Camplify:
“We discovered we had a lot of assumed knowledge: we assumed the dev would know many things about our application, know the same things we knew and have worked with for so long. We were not as prepared as we thought we were to embrace a brand new developer who has never had their hands on our code, and so this has really helped us to improve our processes and workflows. By defining our problems and issues better, should a new developer get assigned to the team, we can get them up to speed and tracking with the app in a short amount of time.”
Jonathan Milgate, CTO
Camplify
The main impact in working with reinteractive is the increased velocity of development support giving Camplify more options should urgent feature requirements arise. It enables the internal team to focus on the main roadmap with flexibility to address high priority feature improvements and ideas that are not necessarily core priorities.
“I can call reinteractive and say ‘hey guys I have this new idea for a feature, can you help us’ and the turnaround time for that is very good. It’s given me another lever to pull, to get things done in order to move quickly, automate and increase our velocity without taking my core team off the roadmap.
“We work with reinteractive team members and they are fantastic, more than capable. We know we can throw things at them; they ask the right questions and they figure it out. Having a different set of eyes on our codebase and processes gives us an external viewpoint on how and why. It helps to stop us getting myopic so we can really focus on continual improvement. We are very confident to have her work as part of the team and commit directly to our code base.”
Jonathan Milgate, CTO
Camplify
reinteractive has integrated with the Camplify team on several sprints of work over the past couple of years to produce some outstanding features that have helped to keep Camplify at the forefront in its segment of the industry, and we look forward to working closely into the future.
The CTO of Camplify joined Errol Schmidt from reinteractive to discuss how Camplify took their core application from a local startup to an international success.
In this recording of a live webinar we went over:
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