Enchanted Diamonds was a NY company specializing in diamond and rare gem retail and wholesale, they were also designers and producers of fine jewelry like engagement and wedding rings, necklaces and pendants, cufflinks, bracelets, among other items.
In September 2018 we were approached to immediately solve several large problems the company was facing with their technology, in addition to redesigning and rebuilding their primary eCommerce platform, and refresh the brand identity. Enchanted was run by Joshua Niamehr, a 4th-generation diamond dealer conducting business in the heart of the NYC diamond district. All sales were transacted on an 8 year old monolithic Ruby on Rails app running on outdated, unmanaged commodity linux hardware hosted on Rackspace. Failures and outages were frequent, daily even.
The first phase of the project was to focus on fixing critical runtime errors, server performance limitations, and failing critical web-scraper cron jobs. We rewrote their cron jobs to run exclusively on AWS Lambda server-less cloud functions for the primary logic, using DynamoDB as ephemeral storage, and CloudWatch as event triggers to fire off each stage in a sequence of functions. We also migrated the 35 GB Postgres DB with millions of records (market data, price changes, user events) and their primary custom Ruby on Rails eCommerce app onto auto-scaling Heroku infrastructure and added comprehensive exception handling & notifications.
Phase 2 was focused on designing & building the user experience for a new modern eCommerce front-end architecture written in JavaScript & ReactJS exchanging data with Postgres through a web-socket hooked up to a lite-weight re-written Ruby on Rails API. We also began development on a totally custom wedding & engagement ring configurator allowing the customer to design & preview 3D models of their desired jewelry written in WebGL, React, and Redux.
In an unlikely and unforeseen turn of events, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2019, curtailing further development on the aforementioned initiatives.
