What an opportunity! As you know I love working to improve the food industry & this was by far my favourite contract to date. Not only was I working with a great company who are going to incredible efforts to feed the world, but I was surrounded by an awesome team seeing first hand the focus we need to strive for when serving food at such a large scale
This feature was simple. Enable a user to see & filter the distributors offering Simplot products. This leveraged Contentful & Algolia to optimise the search functionality. I hadn't worked with Algolia for a long time & it was quite challenging in the beginning. However once I understood how the system worked at a higher level with Contentful. I quickly solved the indexing issues. This contract was quite unique where the rest of the team was in an opposite time zone so I had to be very resourceful to over come this challenge independently.
Searching is a very interesting topic as the user often just wants to type a few words to find exactly the answer. This created an issue in prioritising which results were returned, is the user searching for products, recipes or blog information? To solve this i added a feature to enable the user to select the search category prior to searching. Although quite simple to code, it created a great user experience for the site.
This code base had been copied from the old website.. Upfront this sounds like a smart idea because it give the team a sense of progress. Unfortunately the issues around doing this are delayed. When I joined the team it was very obvious how the old code patterns were causing us to take longer in completing tasks. Thus adding a compounding delay to the projects timeline. To solve this I wrote a document outlining the principles behind best practices in styling & folder structure. Due to delays in our work schedule.. Unfortunately I wasn't able to implement these solutions before my contract finished.
Normally I am the tech lead supporting the teams questions & deployment cycle, however in this project I had to rely on the team's support, to understand the complexities of the code base. This highlighted to me the importance of team work & strong communication. On my next project I want to be the team champion helping as much as I can within the team from Pull Requests to overcoming complex challenges together. Seeing first hand how much support, affects culture & motivation, I now want to use this skill as my best asset.