YouVersion

The Bible App (www.bible.com)

It was an honor to be a part of the YouVersion team for 5 years (8 for Life.Church), while I was on the team we saw the app grow from an idea to over 135 million installs. Listed here are some notable stats, events, and technical stacks.

Overview of the Reach and Scale of YouVersion

• 22 million monthly active users*

• 4 million daily active users*

• 139 million daily API requests - Sunday is much higher, so handling burst traffic (3 to 4x of normal load) was critical*

• Over 600 million app installs

• 700+ versions of the Bible in over 470 languages

• A billion app opens in 2013 (31/sec)*

• Named in Apple's annual "Best of" apps list for 2012 and 2013

• Featured in Google Play for Easter 2013

• YouVersion partnered with Mark Burnett and Roma Downey for The Bible series and the Son of God movie to bring trailers and videos into the Bible app.

• Featured in numerous prominent press pieces including a front page write up last year in the New York Times:

  • http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/technology/the-faithful-embrace-youversion-a-bible-app.html

  • http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/08/youversions-bible-app-passes-100-million-downloads/

  • http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-app-of-god/278006/

  • http://www.christianpost.com/news/bible-app-hits-100-million-downloads-innovative-pastor-hopes-it-surpasses-facebook-twitter-instagram-in-popularity-99624/#tdZDTGdeP71mUdZH.99

  • http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/bible-youversion-lifechurch/

  • http://www.christianpost.com/news/youversions-bobby-gruenewald-on-the-bible-app-for-kids-1-million-downloads-in-just-a-few-days-110194/cpf

• Featured in the Verbum Domini II exhibit in the Vatican (April-June 2014) as a tool to show global Bible engagement in real-time

• Launched a completely new app aimed at kids in December 2013, in less than one week it had over a million downloads

My Role

• Lead engineer and architect

• Led the backend and analytic engineering teams for the past 3+ years

• Spent a lot of my time researching and making core architectural decisions from both an infrastructure and software standpoint

• Core software engineer on all of the backend software

• Primary technical liaison with technical partners like Google and Neo Technology

Core Stack and Infrastructure

• Linux on bare metal servers we managed

• Python, PHP

• Postgres cluster over 1TB in size

• Multi-node Solr cluster

• Multi-node Neo4j cluster

• Gearman (horizontally scalable job cluster, built support to run jobs at scheduled times, and auto-retry jobs with backoff)

• 300GB Memcached cluster

• Google Cloud Storage and S3/Cloudfront for static resources

• App Engine (APIs used: datastore, memcached, search, task queues, channels, logs, sockets)

*Numbers as of February 2014