Perlego

Overview

As part of a team of 8 employees, 4 of us being engineers, we managed to grow the business to 50+ employees raising over £14m in venture funding with our product. My work primarily involved feature development, moving into managing a team with our own Agile / Scrum sprints.

Features

We had implemented a range of B2C user features such as a predictive search engine utilising an integration with Algolia, expanded and reworked reading lists and control for them, as well as multiple full rebrands and technical SEO audits.Internally, I'd led on creating a design system to allow for the componentization of our code, as well as improve workflows for the designers reviewing the components and in conjunction with developers in their creation.

Replatforming

We wanted to start leveraging a state driven UI through the React framework while decoupling it from our old PHP monolith which was upgraded to a microservice architected backend with NodeJs and AWS Lambda. The changes proved successful in improving our development flows, enhanced impression of our app performance, ability for engineers to work in Typescript across frontend and backend, as well as scalability of our backend with the Lambda switch.

front-end
dev lead
greenfield
startup

James Cruickshank

,
Cape Town / London