(Decorist : 8/18-12/19)
Challenge
Take a half-baked v1.5 SOA and continue re-platforming to support scaled integration with corporate parent and its subsidiaries.
Action
Aug 2018
When I joined, it was with the idea that I would be instrumental in helping scale the Decorist relationship-creation paradigm leading to higher AOV to its corporate parent – Bed Bath and Beyond – and its subsidiaries: Buy Buy Baby and Cost Plus World Market.
I inherited the beginnings of a movement away from a Django/Angular/MySQL monolith and towards a Django/React/Postgres multi-tenant platform; a v1.5 of the application architecture. My predecessor had extracted some facets of the monolith to build out the initial stages of the SOA in partnership with another Bed Bath and Beyond subsidiary: One Kings Lane.
Although labeled a multi-tenant platform, it had been built quickly – effectively as a prototype – to service one tenant and was not truly extensible for other silos, though it did encompass solid SOA principles for reuse.
Dec 2018
As part of roadmapping for 2019, wanting to strategically position ‘scalability’ for the corporate org, I worked with my boss – SVP Prod/Tech – to detail a project plan to leverage the exisitng nascent SaaS paradigm for the next generation of the Decorist user experience.
We were sanctioned by the CEO for reduced scope on the roadmap; it would be the very first effort internally for moving towards a new platform to future-power the site. We focused on porting a back-office, manual task of determinging supply-side match and availability with demand-side need.
Wanting to keep a engineer engaged, I shepherded him and helped him understand the Cost-Benefit trade-offs we would need to make in order to meet the deadline, setting a course of re-using the User service for authentication, builidng out a new React-based UI, and integrating with the monolith.
Feb 2019
A few months later, we delivered the feature of supply-side Matching and Availability:
Shortly after launch, business priorities shifted towards a focus on a new eCom offering and we had to back-burner re-platforming efforts.
Dec 2019
Given guidance that 2020 might be the year we could re-visit re-platforming, I ideated around what was still lacking in v1.5 and what would need to be built out, creating a project plan and technical roadmap for the go-forward.
I worked with my boss again around planning and prioritization and we again provided guidance to CEO. Ultimately, we could not secure the necessary corporate integration buy-in for further progress and have had to defer any further progress given other priorities.
Results
- Mentored Lead Engineer towards implementation of first feature for new SOA paradigm.
