Edo Rivai

Wigwam Travel is a startup that offers holiday packages that include transportation and hotel accommodation. I was involved in this project from the beginning and led the development team in building the platform from scratch.

The business revolved around travel experts curating packages, which would be linked to APIs for flight and hotel prices. We'd index hundreds of travel date combinations for every package, allowing users to view the packaged prices using a calendar.

The front end was written in React and connected to our back end using GraphQL. With Wigwam Travel being an eCommerce website, achieving a high conversion rate was a priority, and the content and website performance played an essential part. Using server-side rendering and lazy loading and building the website as a single-page app, we optimized the initial page load, which Amazon proved to significantly improve the conversion rate.

We initially deployed the app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk but migrated to Kubernetes and the Google Cloud Platform because the resource-sharing capabilities significantly decreased the costs. Also, the resilient scheduling mechanism increased our confidence during deployments and node failures.

As I was writing unit tests to test some back end code which sent outbound HTTP requests, it occurred to me that the process of mocking the outbound requests was somewhat tedious.

At first, I asked around on Twitter, how other people handled it but didn't get a very satisfying response. That's when I decided to make a deep dive into the topic and eventually wrote my findings up in a blog post, which got published in the FreeCodeCamp Medium publication, one of the biggest programming publications.

Paperflies is a startup that underwent a lot of pivots and transformations. Supporting shifting requirements was one of the biggest challenges I've tackled there.

I started out as the only developer, implementing an MVP using very minimal server-side code. The front end was mainly plain HTML+CSS, with some vanilla JavaScript for small interactions.

The scope of the project grew substantially when we decided to add a full-fledged search engine, connecting to a big data provider with *very* old legacy systems. We'd connect our back end to their SOAP API, and render everything in an Angular 1 app.

This was right around the time that React came out, and I was running into performance problems rendering and sorting the list of search results in Angular. React promised to be more efficient with performing DOM mutations, which is when we migrated to React and have never looked back since.

As the team grew, my role changed to Lead Developer, and I was put in charge of managing 5 developers. I was in close contact with the designer, collaborating on responsive designs, and extracting the technical requirements for the dev team.