Edo R.

Wigwam Travel is a startup that offers holiday packages; a flight and a hotel. I was involved in this project from day 1, leading the development team to build the platform from scratch. The core of the business revolved around our travel experts hand curating packages, which would then be linked to APIs for flight and hotel prices. We'd index hundreds of travel date combinations per package which allows users to view the packaged prices up front in a calendar. The frontend is written in React and connects to our backend using GraphQL. Since Wigwam is an eCommerce website, conversion was a top priority. Besides the content, an important factor of conversion is the performance of the website. Using techniques like server side rendering, lazy loading, and the building it all as a single page app, we optimized for initial page load, which Amazon has proven to have a high impact on the conversion rate. We initially deployed the app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, but migrated to Kubernetes on GCP for a number of reasons; it's resource sharing capabilities dramatically decreased our Cloud bill, and the resilient scheduling mechanism provided a lot of confidence during deployments as well as during node failures.

Paperflies is a startup that underwent a lot of pivots and transformations. Supporting shifting requirements was one of the biggest challenges I've tackled there. I started out as the only developer, implementing an MVP using very minimal server side code. The frontend was mainly plain HTML+CSS, with some vanilla JavaScript for small interactions. The scope of the project grew substantially when we decided to add a full-fledged search engine, connecting to a big data provider with *very* old legacy systems. We'd connect our backend to their SOAP API, and render everything in an Angular 1 app. This was right around the time that React came out, and I was running into performance problems rendering and sorting the list of search results in Angular. React promised to be more efficient with performing DOM mutations, which is when we migrated to React and have never looked back since. As the team grew, my role changed to Lead Developer, and I was put in charge of managing 5 developers. I was in close contact with the designer, collaborating on responsive designs, and extracting the technical requirements for the dev team.