North Six

North Six is a highly-acclaimed, global collective of producers, content creators, and thinkers with twenty years of experience. They pride themselves on being leaders in the industry, setting standards, and pushing the boundaries of their projects.

When they approached me, they were undergoing a rebranding with the support of COMBO NYC. At the time they were three separate companies and they were looking to be united under the name of North Six.

Main Challenges

The first challenge was balancing performance and making content uploading easy for the client. We needed to keep data payloads small, media to be light weight, and not to bother clients about what file size or media format to upload. Our solution was two parts. On the server side, we took advantage of indexing and aggregation to make queries quick with MongoDB. On the content side, we used Cloudinary as a DAM (Digital Asset Management) which provides a powerful api to perform file type and size conversions and serve it through their CDN.

The second challenge was localization. At the time, their content management system did not have a built in way of performing translations. So we had to build custom content types that provided dynamic language options for any text content they uploaded on Strapi.

The last challenge was keeping systems in sync. Whenever we made changes in Strapi (CMS) we needed to ensure Algolia would update their index on their end. So we created a small middleman app that would listen to Strapi changes via webhooks, convert the data payload, and update Algolia.

Development Specs

• Angular for Frontend
• Node JS for server side
• Strapi CMS for content
• Cloudinary for media conversions
• Algolia for search engine
• MongoDB