Ecommerce platform for a fashion label

Eighteen months on the backend of an ecommerce platform for a fashion label, working remotely as part of a larger delivery team. I joined as a developer on the services behind the catalogue and checkout, and spent the second half of the engagement coordinating the work rather than doing most of it.

The two halves

The development half was familiar Spring Boot service work: REST endpoints, integration with the payment and stock systems, and a good deal of care around the catalogue, which had more variation in it than a general-purpose product model wants to allow. Seasonal collections do not behave like an ordinary inventory, and most of the awkward modelling was there.

The coordination half was less familiar and, on balance, harder. It meant keeping a distributed team pointed at the same sprint goals, running the ceremonies without letting them expand, and being the person who noticed when two people were solving the same problem in different repositories. The technical judgement still mattered, but it went into reviewing and questioning rather than writing.

• Java and Spring Boot services, Maven builds, containerised deployments
• REST integrations with payment, stock and order-management systems
• Agile delivery in two-week sprints, with the usual distributed-team caveats
• Handover documentation written while the context was still fresh, not at the end

If there is one thing I took from it, it is that a well-scoped ticket saves more time than a clever abstraction. Most of the delay on that project came from ambiguity about what was being asked for, not from the code.