This is how we failed enough times to get MACH right on the last try

The only way to make things more complex is when you have an old legacy system that needs to be trained into being something more modern, and more effecient. What should have been a no-brainer became a 2-year process of failure after failure, until it became a success on the last attempt. In this talk, we’ll take you through the challenges of building vs buying, choosing the wrong vendors and then choosing worse vendors and how- ultimately, we broke the most fundamental rules of e-commerce to make user experiences even better.

To do that successfully - we had to break some of the most basic “rules” of online commerce. We made the process asynchronous, with event-driven systems and react server components for one of the fastest experiences ever made. Because of that, our users can now go from from payment to order in 2 seconds - instead of half a minute.

E-commerce platfroms are slow and difficult, right? Wrong

In this talk, i'll show take you on a journey of e-commerce transformation - from a monolithic (and outdated) server-side rendered PHP app - into bespoke SaaS e-commerce platform that follows MACH standards. To do that successfully - we had to break some of the most basic “rules” of online commerce. We made the process asynchronous, with event-driven systems and react server components for one of the fastest experiences ever made. Because of that, our users can now go from from payment to order in 2 seconds - instead of half a minute.

Development setup: how an important part of your toolset is often overlooked

An engineer setup is one of the most critical aspects of their jobs. Their choice of tools, IDEs, shortcuts, fonts and ever colour schemes have a fundamental part in either making an individual more or less productive. Tech leads often overlook this essential part. It's often left for the developer to set up at their discretion. But is this the best approach?

In this talk, you'll follow the story of three different developers and how their preferred setup was causing them to struggle in delivering. A few changes on their IDE, colour scheme or even a better choice of tools changed how they worked and how to flow state would become way more natural. It's a talk about cognitive shifts, developer experience and the reason dark mode is not only about not attracting bugs.

This talk was presented in Lead Dev London 2022 and Turing Fest 2022