(The RealReal : 2/17-3/17)
Early in 2017, a Tiger Team formed of me, a Lead ENGR, the CTO, the VP PROD, and a PM.
The CTO and VP PROD had an idea to empower Merchandising and Marketing to further drive content/conversions from the Homepage. While they previously had some power to manage that content through an admin interface with a limited schema, the idea was to give them even more creative expression, allowing them free-reign over their HTML.
A few weeks into the project, the Lead ENGR, who had been tasked with building out the intial POC, left (leaving us in a lurch.) Under pressure, I still delivered basic CMS functionality via Rails and demo’d same to the C-suite.
Shortly thereafter, when requirements radically changed and the mandate from the CTO was suddenly to move towards a WYSIWIG experience through a 3rd party Content-as-a-Service provider as rendered via Phoenix, while moving away from a lazy-load landing page to a 3×3 grid, I built out a simple placeholder homepage in Elixir and then evaluated and prototyped against several CaaS vendors (e.g. Prismic, Kentico Cloud, Contentful.)
When the CTO settled upon Prismic for us to move forward with, I conceived the project plan for engineers to carry the effort forward while also developing the initial migration plan for porting route-by-route from Rails to Phoenix.
Results
- Built MVP of company’s Rails-to-Phoenix migration.