Joveen

Summary

I was a full stack software engineer at Joveen, working on its e-commerce site in React, Java with Spring Boot and MySQL.

The role

I worked across the React front end, the Java API behind it and the MySQL database underneath. I was also on a coding bootcamp alongside the job.

The problems

• A slow site. Pages took too long to load.
• A codebase on its way out. Some modules were still in PHP and had to move to Spring Boot.
• Mobile and browser bugs. Layouts and features broke on some phones and browsers.
• Slow queries. A key API was slower than it needed to be.

Decisions

• Make the front end do less up front. We refactored React components and lazy-loaded assets, so a page loads what it needs first.
• Move PHP to Spring Boot in pieces. Migrating module by module let us release in smaller steps. I wrote endpoints, validation and tests, and fixed defects along the way.
• Test across browsers, then fix. A cross-browser testing pipeline caught the mobile layout and functionality bugs, and I fixed them.
• Measure the database. We added indexes and rewrote slow queries, starting with the API that mattered most.

What changed

Page load fell by 40%. Deploys went from 10 minutes to under 2. Mobile retention rose by 30%. The key API’s p95 dropped from 520 ms to 230 ms, and cloud costs fell by 18%.

What I took with me

Alongside the job I did freelance AI training, reviewing 1,000 code items across TypeScript, Python, Java, C# and SQL at 97% QA precision. It was my first sustained work with AI on code, and the start of the thread that leads to the workflow I built at BNP Paribas.