I want to take some time in this month's newsletter to celebrate some of the amazing people on the Uptech Studio team and the great work they do. We talk a lot about product strategy, design, and technology in this newsletter, but none of that happens without the people who actually do the work. So this month, we're putting the spotlight where it belongs.
Uptech Studio has been KQED's mobile development partner since 2021, building and maintaining their Flutter-based app that serves as the gold standard among public radio organizations. Recently, our team took on a new challenge: bringing KQED's live radio, podcasts, and daily news programming into the car through Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Who's been actually doing that work? Two of our software developers: Jon Holtan & Mark Fransen. Since the KQED app is built entirely in Flutter, extending it to work with CarPlay and Android Auto wasn't completely straightforward.
Jon & Mark navigated a series of tricky problems — nested navigation bugs where loading spinners refused to disappear, connection state management for cars that drop and re-establish Bluetooth mid-drive, and the fundamental design challenge of representing a rich content catalog in a constrained interface that's tuned for use while driving.
If you're interested in more background about the project (from strategy to implementation details), you should check out the full case study.
If you've been following the AI space and wondering how companies are actually connecting large language models to their own data, this one's for you. Carl Wills, another of our software developers has been exploring vector databases and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines.
Carl gave a brown bag talk recently, breaking down how these tools work together to make AI applications smarter and more grounded in real information. Whether you're technical or just trying to understand what's practical versus what's hype, it's worth checking out his presentation.
I'd love to highlight everyone on the team, but I know there's only so far down into a newsletter that people are willing to read.
If you want to learn more about our amazing team members and you're interested in working with a technology partner full of great people, you should get in touch with us.
Claude Ciocan
Partner, Uptech Studio
