HeadFirst

In this project, I briefly focused on stabilizing, maintaining, expanding, and replacing the front-end of Select, HeadFirst’s primary business system. This system matches supply and demand between clients and contractors (mostly freelancers). Profiles, assignments, bids, contracts, and documents are the core entities. At the start, I acted as interim replacement for the last internal employee who had left and found a working system built using outdated technology (Adobe Flex). My role was to guide and implement the transition from Flex to a state-of-the-art HTML5/CSS3 front-end. The condition was that the “shop had to remain open.” I recommended migrating by user group, starting with the least risky (smallest group). This provided valuable knowledge for subsequent groups. Ultimately, the entire operation went smoothly, and the Flex technology was phased out. Parallel to this major project, numerous technical improvements (more asynchronous code, library upgrades, etc.) and new features (reports, social media integration, full-text search improvements) were implemented. Finally, the transition from Apache SOLR to the more state-of-the-art ElasticSearch was initiated. This was the first step to enable the system to better match supply and demand with more artificial intelligence. I also elevated the internal development process, allowing us to deploy at any time of day, with rollback scenarios.

Java, Spring, Hibernate, AngularJS, Lucene, ElasticSearch, FOP, POI, AWS EC2 & RDS, GIT, system integrations