Bermuda Tree Frog – News and Alerts

A small island in the Atlantic Ocean, Bermuda has a population of about 65,000. Already possessing a tight-knit community with proud heritage, the Government of Bermuda wanted an easier way of distributing news and information to their citizens.

Through a public RFP in 2018, the Government of Bermuda solicited bids for the development of a mobile app to help them do just that. They wanted to take their existing process for publishing information and have the mobile app fit seamlessly in.

The Government of Bermuda’s website (https://gov.bm) already houses all of the information they desired to share with their community.

Instead of attempting to restructure their entire solution, we wanted to build something that fits within their existing ecosystem so they didn’t need to train anybody or adjust their existing processes.

Another key component of the project was to work with students from Bermuda College to get them hands-on experience building the mobile app. With light programming experience and no professional experience, Bermuda wanted the vendor to work with the students to prepare them for their future careers in software development.

Our solution was focused on two separate areas:

1. Fitting into Bermuda’s existing process for distributing information
2. Getting the Bermuda College students meaningful experience

The solution we created minimized training, overhead, and additional expenses for the Government.

We utilized Elastic Cloud and a routine processor to scrape content from their website at a set interval. This allowed their employees to continue publishing content in the same way they were used to before, while also allowing the content to be fetched by our mobile app. Once scraped, the content is then indexed into an Elasticsearch index using the Elastic Cloud.

Once the content is in Elastic Cloud, our custom API fetches pages or specific content for the mobile app based on different taxonomies in the Governments’ Drupal website.

During the development of the mobile app, we worked for several hours each week with the Bermuda College students. Using Zoom, VSCode, and Expo, we were able to deliver a collaborative environment with their students from thousands of miles away.

The student work culminated into them giving a presentation of the work to Bermuda’s Premier, David Burt.

Mobile App

• React-native
• Expo
• Objective C
• Java

API

• Node.js
• Typescript
• Elasticsearch

Website

• Maintained by Government of Bermuda
• Drupal