Joao Albuquerque

LendInvest is an investment platform that handles short-term, development, and buy-to-let mortgages.

On the business side (which included features and improvements), we substantially reduced the amount of work for account managers:
• Top-ups were credited to user accounts as soon the money arrived in a LendInvest account.
• The interest rate process was simplified and automatically processed.
• Implemented anti-money laundering checks on withdrawals.
• Implemented a rule that a minimum loan investment should be from £100 to £10,000.

LendInvest hired me as a team leader of an in-house team of five: two back-end developers, one front-end developer, and two remote developers.

My main goal was to identify the problems in the code and solve them. But, unfortunately, we found too many issues (top five OWASP) in the code. Hence, we changed the team and rebuilt the platform according to best practices and clean code that followed SOLID principles with microservices architecture.

We adopted the Agile methodology with 2-week sprints. I also hired a new team since the old members were unwilling to evolve their skills. Apart from taking care of the team, I also worked on DevOps and software development and architecture.

CARE-ON is an online marketplace that makes connecting families with carers easy. With CARE-ON, you can find trusted caregivers for child care, adult care, senior care, pet care, and other care services.

I relished developing the CARE-ON project. The idea has born after my partner became pregnant, and we found that the caregiver market in countries south of the EU was primarily driven by word of mouth.

We developed a prototype platform, and we presented it at Web Summit in Ireland. At that moment, we knew that we would only continue developing the concept if we could find an investor or business angel.

I still believe there is an opportunity for this project to be further developed and become a business.

Development-wise, everything that a platform requires has been built, including the schedule, user registration, social proof reviews, document uploads, permissions, ACL, role access, landing pages for investors, and so on.

The idea behind FreightHub is to be the perfect digital freight-forwarding experience for a 21st-century shipper: a 1-stop shop that would cover the entire process chain from quotation, booking, document management, track and trace all the way to proactive exception handling and supply chain data analytics.

In this project, we have a great amount of technology based on microservices and event-driven architecture to handle all the asynchronous processes. We needed to collect data from many different places such as users, ports, customer managers, carriers, etc., and map all this information together and deliver it to the user. We also implemented multiple custom checks to pull data from different locations and an API for other web services to push the data.