02 2023–now
Internal systems and client applications
Breadth, and owning several products at once.
- Client
- Speedlo Pro
- Period
- 2023–now
- Role
- Lead developer
- Stack
- Next.jsReactTypeScriptGraphQL + ApolloChakra UIZustandReact Native
Context
Speedlo Pro is a system for restaurants and delivery: ordering sites, POS, kiosks and order tracking. The company is roughly 20–30 people.
Problem
Holding technical direction and quality across several products at once, with a team whose size kept moving.
On top of that, nowhere was it written down how frontend was actually done at the company.
Decisions
- 01
Write down how frontend is done here
I produced the internal FE Philosophy, FE Development lifecycle, FE Coding guidelines and FE Deployments documents. Oral tradition became a standard that can be handed over.
- 02
Lead the product, not the tickets
On the kiosk applications and the other products I am lead developer, meaning the person answerable for the technical direction of the whole product rather than for individual tickets.
- 03
Do not build everything from scratch
For every brief I look for the option that balances effort against benefit. Not everything is worth writing by hand, and not everything is worth building at all.
- 04
Be in the room when we hire
I took part in interviews with the CEO when hiring senior and mid-level frontend developers and a UX/UI designer. I wrote the technical assignment for frontend interviews, and the brief for a UX/UI designer at a time when the company had none.
My role
- Reviewer and responsible person on the shop, waiter and driver projects.
- Kiosk and mobile applications in React Native.
- Onboarding a senior colleague, leading a mid-level developer.
Result
- Frontend now has a written standard a new joiner can be onboarded against.
- Leadership cites me as an example of a product owner already delivering results.
- One story stands in for the rest: on a Friday evening it turned out in production that the waiter app was losing the selected branch when returning from the payment gateway, which risked duplicate payments. A colleague and I debugged it from six until eleven at night so it would be ready on Saturday. The load test, in the form of a sold-out league match, passed without a single error.