Bombinate Ltd

Senior Developer

Bombinate

Bombinate is a £3m+ a year marketplace for high quality European craftsmanship brands selling to luxury consumers
- Actively liaised with stakeholders on the supplier side of the business to design and deliver technical solutions to core business problems such as:
- Implementing unique SKU (item) shipping prices & times set by suppliers from the inventory management system which saved between £2000-5000+ per day in large item shipping costs for Bombinate, improved delivery brackets for each item and scaled back customer service complaints as sales scaled up
- Improving the dashboard experience for suppliers as it was buggy and lacked essential time-saving and human error-eliminating features. The following features greatly improved supplier relations: Adding the option to download order data into a clean CSV format (previously suppliers had to manually type in details into their own systems), edit new, completed & shipped order details and auto-generate invoices for suppliers to download.
- Infrastructure:
- Audited AWS infrastructure for security, scaling and monitoring issues then
created & scoped tickets for the backlog for any issues found
- Created a roadmap to get close as possible to the AWS Well-Architected
framework by Q4 2020 (when sales should accelerate) including moving to AWS Lambda, AWS APIGateway, AWS Aurora, AWS ELB for some apps and slowly integrating GraphQL to reduce massive payload sizes to the FE. Those implementations would reduce monthly tech expenses while smoothly handling traffic spikes on demand.
- Installed Datadog for monitoring which helped troubleshoot and optimise end-to-end application performance and bust pesky NodeJS memory leaks
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- Reusable Component UI library:
- Oversee the building of UI components with Storybook, and setting best practices such as unit tests, scalable file structures, continuous deployment for easier QA syncing with design team and other recommended practices
- Guided a junior developer to work on the component library and get used to the FE codebase
- Decoupled some parts of the website such as the Navigation menu and search filters from being reliant on the tech team to being in control of the merchandising and marketing teams with Prismic content editor
- Worked with the product manager, tech team and stakeholders to properly scope tickets and clear miscommunications ahead of upcoming sprints
- Fixed numerous bugs across the frontend, backend and dashboard and promoted a tech culture that reduces the likelihood of bugs happening by encouraging unit tests with most pull requests, setting up pre-commit hooks to detect errors, Github PR templates for descriptive PRs, scalable folder structures, reasonable integration tests, common VSCode settings for code styles.

Bombinate.com

ECMWF

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) required the development of a complex admin dashboard for their clusters of supercomputers (one of the largest facilities in the world) and hired me to fully develop the system.
As lead engineer, I was in charge of the entire software development lifecycle. This includes:
- Having an extensive discovery and planning phase with key product owners
to productively extract actionable requirements, stories and steps
- Developing the full wireframes of the supercomputer dashboards while being in close contact with the various stakeholders of ECMWF
- Liaising with ECMWF’s backend developers as well as product owners to develop a well-architected and well-documented API for the frontend dashboard and clearly documenting each API endpoint that the frontend will use with Swagger API and OpenAPI 3.0 specification.
- Developing a robust, well-tested and architected application with React and Redux using best practices for a scalable interface with a smooth user experience
- Documenting each part of the dashboard codebase for future developers
- Training future users of the dashboard on how it works, how to use it as well as add a comprehensive documentation wiki on Confluence
- Provide any post-delivery support for up to 1 month after delivery

Dashboard Development

Drover (now Cazoo)

I was brought in to fix a large buggy Rails / React codebase, help improve the engineering processes at Drover and build their mobile app prototype. Drover got acquired by Cazoo Ltd (for over £100 million in 2020).
- Improved the web app’s performance by removing dead code, setting up tree-shaking with Webpack, code-splitting where needed, lazy-loading images, using a CDN service such as imgix to also optimise images on mobile devices, prevent unnecessary re-renders with React components, fix memory leaks, encourage writing performant CSS, remove thread blocking code, cache expensive API calls, and use Chrome Lighthouse and React Profiler to reduce the overall bundle size
- Guiding the team with best engineering practices such as writing relevant tests, “not reinventing the wheel”, having better coding standards, ensuring pull requests are carefully reviewed, documenting, introducing TypeScript
- Encouraged developers to take ownership of improving the engineering culture by suggesting weekly guild meetings to discuss ideas, introducing Confluence for decision logs and incident reports, discussing concerns to senior management
- Coordinated, discussed and planned with various stakeholders and developers to build several features to meet KPIs across squads for a particular aspect of the business
- Sprint planning, breakdown of stories and epics into technical tasks for developers, designers and product owners
- Encouraged a move to microservices to be efficient with our tech expenditure and microfrontends to vastly simplify the codebase complexity for each part of the business.

Several features

Tripartie


Tripartie urgently required a mobile prototype to raise further funding, I stepped in to build upon their existing mobile app codebase, setup a CI testing environment with Expo and improve several memory leaks across the codebase.
I used React Native / Redux and Styled Components for their reusable UI library.

Mobile App

Phantom Studios

● Worked closely with their main client TariLabs - a California-based Web3 / NFT startup - to work on their huge backlog of tasks and bugs in a large, complex, buggy codebase that we inherited
● Fixed numerous bugs, introduced Storybooks to preview components for more visibility and so that design, developer and product teams can collaborate easier on those, encouraged integration, unit, snapshot and visual regression testing
● Encourage best frontend practices such as re-using components where possible, improve redux performance where multiple actions were being needlessly called, profiling React components to prevent unnecessary renders, remove unused packages, lazy load pages where appropriate and improve Chrome Lighthouse scores
● Added new features to the website such as revamped Metamask login / wallet connection with web3 / ethers.js and new components and pages
 
● Contributed to group discussions about new features and best tools to use for our use-case


NFT Sharing Platform

0xA Technologies

● Worked closely with a product manager, designers and developers to develop a bespoke NFT platform for the United States Football League (USFL) via Fox, the SXSW Festival NFT website, 0xA’s website and 0xArt - their invite-only product for NFT sales
● Encouraged best practices engineering-wide such as: bi-weekly meetings to discuss engineering improvements, encouraging developers to be product-oriented and increase sense of ownership, ,impactful pull request templates, writing E2E tests with Cypress for critical purchase and other user flows, using RainbowKit instead of custom-building ethers/Web3.js wallet integrations, making use of 3rd party services to improve products such as Hotjar for feedback gathering, Marker.io for better bug tracking, Imgix to serve assets, Google Analytics etc
● Frontend best-practices such as: caching where required instead of multiple fetches to the backend where appropriate, dynamic imports with NextJS, remove unused dependencies with depcheck, preloading content, optimising images and scripts, using semantic HTML for component library, error logging into monitoring services,
● Helped scope out Jira tickets and tasks in careful detail to avoid any mis-communications across developers, design and other stakeholders
● Worked on payment flows with RainbowKit and ethers.js and web3.js
● Use feature flags for enabling or disabling features on demand and if certain features
were problematic (i.e 3rd party dependencies encountering issues that end up
affecting our products)
● Introduced Contentful to manage website copy so non-technical people can edit
content without requiring developers

NFT Platforms

FairHQ


● Took ownership of their frontend products and fixed bugs & performance issues
● Rationalized technical stack to be simple, easy to hire for, and based on battle-tested
Open Source technology (Node.js, PostgreSQL, React)
● Interviewed and managed 3 freelancers to update FairHQ’s Wordpress website
● Automated build, testing and continuous deployment with Github Actions CI
● Clarified ambiguous feature tasks into precise, detailed, well-scoped tickets
● Integrated logic so that surveys could be sent twice a year rather than once (which was
costing them business) and translated new Figma designs into React pages
● Worked with the CTO to fix general bugs, increase coding standards (tests, pre-commit
hooks, documentation) add improved backend monitoring
● Suggested improvements to the company in general, such as automating manual
document-checking with AI (with AWS A2i etc), streamlined onboarding system, hiring product managers as they scale and improving communication


Expert, freelance Stakeholder Management engineers