Challenge, approach, and impact

• User Experience (UX) required a significant upgrade

  Moving away from merely replicating the desktop app’s functionalities, we collaborated closely with the client, striving to craft features that met users' contemporary needs.

• Code's instability

  We then identified the project's core issue: its instability, mainly because it was developed by chemists rather than programmers. Though functional, Chematica wasn’t ready for mass commercial usage. This necessitated us to streamline its backend, which was originally a potpourri of Java, C++, Python, and CoffeeScript.

• Lack of documentation

  Shifting from a chemical desktop app to a modern web application was no easy task. One of our initial hurdles was the computational chemical backend – a vital element of Chematica that had little to no API documentation.

  During the due diligence time, Kamil, our CTO, took upon himself the task of reverse-engineering and documenting the API. It took him over two weeks of careful study to get to know the code well, and the work accelerated from there.

• Security & IP protection

  Security was paramount. Given the significance of IP protection in the pharmaceutical sphere, we invested heavily in ensuring the code was production-ready, secure, and scalable.

  Some of our key security measures included:

  Whitelist identifying,

  Multi-factor authorization,

  Enforcing continuous security baseline compliance,

  Asymmetric encryption algorithms,

  Hashing algorithms.

  In the following months after the acquisition, rigorous pen tests and thorough security scans were conducted by an external entity, where Chematica stood tall with no major issues.