At Infinite Retry Labs, we're on a mission to ignite curiosity and foster a love for science in children. We're building a rich, engaging, and interactive kids' science app and platform, and our cutting-edge tech stack is the engine powering this exciting endeavor. In the spirit of "work in the open" and "show as you build," we're excited to share a bit about some of the tools making this next-gen educational experience possible. We're prioritizing familiarity and efficiency, scalability, and seamless multi-platform deployment to support our ambitious goals in building a platform rich in graphics and animation.

So, what is our tech stack?

The Multiplatform Advantage: Build Once, Deploy Everywhere

Every member of our team has extensive experience in native mobile development so it should come as no surprise that we've been following the maturity of Kotlin multiplatform with great interest. While we've seen countless "write once, run anywhere" solutions come and go, and we're naturally somewhat skeptical of them, we feel that Kotlin Multiplatform with Compose Multiplatform is finally solving many of the pain points of earlier solutions and has matured enough for serious engineering investment.

• Kotlin Multiplatform with Compose Multiplatform: This powerful duo allows us to develop a single maintainable codebase that delivers high-quality, native experiences across iOS, Android, and potentially desktop and web.
• Building more in the open: Where the community would benefit from solutions we build, especially for Kotlin Multiplatform adoption, we strive to open source solutions to build up this community for the long term.

Infra: All the Usual Suspects

Deployments for mobile change very little with KMP, so many of these tools will be familiar to mobile developers.

• A variety of Google Cloud & Firebase services allow us to rapidly develop and host back end, private, and, secure services for our products.
• Apple & Google Play: Deployments for mobile are automated and uploaded through the Apple App Store and Google Play store.
• Crashlytics: Still table stakes for mobile observability.
• Mixpanel: Tried-and-true mobile analytics for core user journeys and experimentation.

Automation & Tooling Supercharged with AI/ML Behind the Scenes

While we have concerns about exposing children directly to AI content, we believe in using the best and most accurate AI-assisted automation behind the scenes to help keep our team efficient and our work scalable with a small agile team.

• Firebase Studio and Google Colab, AI assistants for coding, and Firebase AI Logic SDKs for our custom tooling to more quickly iterate through internal workflows, saving critical time on a small team on tasks like content management.
• AI capabilities from Google Gemini and OpenAI, as well as Claude, help us with day-to-day toil tasks with a small team while code assistance helps provide extra code reviews and insights to keep the quality of our codebase healthy with low friction.

Leverage Creative Tools, Both Familiar & New

• Blender: We invest in high quality models for powerful and consistent key elements of our platform design. Blender is the backbone of our 3D rendering pipeline, enabling our designers to craft vibrant scientific models, immersive environments, and captivating animations that make complex concepts consistent, digestible and exciting for kids.
• Adobe Creative Suite: Tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects help us create stunning visuals for all aspects of the business, while lightweight products like Express help with social content.
• Figma: Essential for collaborative design, Figma allows us to rapidly prototype delightful and interactive elements, ensuring the user experience is intuitive and fun for young hands.
• We're always exploring and integrating new cutting-edge AI tools to accelerate content creation, generate diverse visual assets, and even dynamically adapt elements to enhance personalized learning paths, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in interactive educational content. We've experimented with emerging creative tools, like Adobe Firefly for sound effects, Runway ML for powerful video performances with strong creative control and references, and Meshy.ai for 3D model prototyping.

Familiar Workspace & Development Ecosystem

• Google Workspace: Familiar work tools, from mail and calendaring, to documents and spreadsheets, and of course, video conferencing.
• ‍GitHub: For robust version control and collaborative code development, keeping our intricate app's evolution organized and efficient.
  
  • It's also where you'll find our open source work.
• Slack: Our central hub for instant team communication, crucial for an agile development process in a remote-first setting.
• Figjam to visually communicate with each other in brainstorming sessions, as well as feedback sessions with kids.

This tech stack empowers Infinite Retry Labs to iterate quickly, scale effectively, and deliver exceptional experiences across all platforms. We're constantly evolving our toolkit to stay at the forefront of innovation.

Interested in learning more? Follow along in the blog and if you want to support us, please subscribe for updates as we build out our platform.