Eric Belfer

An MVP Rails-based monthly subscription newspaper site that features articles on local political issues. The idea is to see if people would be interested in deep diving into political topics directly related to them and their local community. The site's goal is to test user traction. Therefore, we integrated Optimizely to allow admin users to create various A/B experiments. The app also integrates monthly recurring payments with Recurly, and the payment processing piece integrates with PayPal, Apple Payments, and Stripe. Finally, the app users ActiveAdmin to create a simple framework for admin adjustments and reporting on the administrative side.

A Rails-based app is a literature publishing platform driven by the scripts submitted by the community. Authors post partial or complete manuscripts to the site, readers vote on the scripts submitted, and then the Inkshares publishing team selects the tops scripts to publish in the traditional sense. I was one of the back-end developers on the project. A significant feature I built out was the search functionality for the site, which integrates with Algolia Search. In addition, it allowed for dynamic typeahead searching on all manuscripts. Another feature that I spearheaded was the payment service which leveraged Stripe to process the payments.

The app is an eCommerce site built with Next.js and an AWS Lambda API back end connected to DynamoDB. Vercel is used to make app deployments. The app is 100% server-side rendered, which leverages Vercel's CDN. The app has a blog that leverages Cosmic JS, a headless CMS, to allow new blog pages to be added monthly by the owner to improve Google site rankings. The app also has multiple URL endpoints for serving customers in Europe vs. Northern America as pricing, shipping, catalog of products, and languages change between the two regions. I was the lead developer and worked with the design team to bring the app from an idea to production. The app is simple but leverages various advanced technologies to create a fast and robust site.

The Node.js Accelerator is an exclusive learning program that educates JavaScript and back-end developers in Node.js, ExpressJs, NestJS, and TypeScript. This is a two-month program that consists of rigorous learning exercises, live instructor-led sessions by SMEs, hands-on activities along with a stringent evaluation process, comprehensive assessments, and an incremental project where participants implement a couple of Microservices (REST APIs) using Express.js and Nest.js. The incremental project simulates an eCommerce application consisting of two services, i.e., a user service to implement the authentication with user management and a product-catalog service that offers functionalities to manage inventory.