Juan Manuel Varela

LATAM is the biggest airline in Latin America. It is currently going through an Agile transformation and re-writing its legacy code into a modern stack.

Programming the Ticket Change application was no small challenge taking the joint effort of two interdisciplinary SCRUM teams a year and a half to build. I am very proud to have been part of the process. There was a high focus on adding value to the product every iteration. Thanks to the creativity of the team we were able to have a useful product after only one month. The airline business is a complex one. The Ticket Change application, due to its huge scope, is particularly difficult. It is also a highly critical product for the airline.

Testing was at the very core of the application. TDD (Test-driven Development) and BDD (Behavior-driven development) were mandatory to ensure a high quality product, ease of modification and feature addition. CI (Continuous Integration) helped to test our ideas and features right away. This was all done under high pressure for the product to succeed and low tolerance to failure on critical issues such as payment and ticket consistency.

To this day, Ticket Change is regarded as a great success story for the company.

LATAM is the biggest airline in Latin America. It is currently going through an Agile transformation, rewritten from legacy code into a modern stack.

After the success of the Ticket Change application achieved by my team, the team was tasked with making a sister application called Same Day Flight Change. Though the application was smaller in scope to the previous one, it had never been done before by the company, hence the challenges were new to all team members. It was remarkable to make a 55,000 employee company define their business domain and efficiently build the site from scratch to production.

The team was already very mature and knowledgeable about the domain, so the product delivery timeline was done with high precision and the delivery was right on time. It is shown as an example of how SCRUM teams can evolve to be very mature and have very high and consistent output throughout. Testing was at the core of the application. TDD (Test-driven Development) and BDD (Behavior-driven development) ensured a high quality product, since failure on the same day of the flight can not be tolerated.

A useful learning experience with a mature and skilled team.

A pivotal stage of growth and learning in my career as a web developer and entrepreneur was in Graz, Austria. I had the opportunity to be one of the first employees of the award-winning BikeCitizens startup.

When I joined the company it was still in its early stages. As the in-house web-developer, I was in charge of building and maintaining the institutional sites, the landing pages for the products, an online JS based route planner, and the eCommerce shop for the physical products. Further responsibilities included going to conferences, pitching, designing, and promoting online presence.

This was a very productive time for the startup which went through exponential growth. I am extremely proud of have been a part of this process.

This is the landing page for the award winning Finn bicycle mount that I developed while working at BikeCitizens. The site, though simple, had a great CTR and did great with the selling of the star product of the company. Lots of experimentation was done to come up with this site, the result was a highly effective site which is concise but helpful and focused.

During my time at the startup BikeCitizens, I was tasked with making an online route planner for bicycles using the API developed for native smartphone apps. The site was built from scratch using leaflet.js, an open source map library.

This application, in spite of its simple interface, is very powerful and a great way to promote and showcase the routing capabilities of our algorithms.

A simple yet beautiful landing page for the the sister product of BikeCitizens, an award winning smartphone app. This was done during the time I was the web developer for BikeCitizens.