I joined hipages in 2024, at a point where the company was at a bit of a crossroads with their front end web architecture. I was asked to create a future state architectural vision, with the challenge of both planning for the uplift of the existing marketing website and microsites, as well as accommodating the imminent development of a new business management web application.

I spent the first few months learning about the existing technology in use and seeking to understand past architectural choices. I audited the front end codebases, and worked with teams working on web projects to understand challenges they had with the current approaches and tech.

I then worked to identify opportunities for improvement of that front end architecture, and to define a roadmap for modernising the architecture over time.

Some of the key focus areas included:

• Migrating from custom in-house solutions to more standard and widely adopted technologies (e.g. React Router, NestJS), to improve maintainability and scalability.
• Building and adopting a robust design system implementation for web, to help achieve a consistent and high-quality user experience across all web projects, and to improve team efficiency when building user interfaces.
• Standardising workflows for web UI development, to improve collaboration and consistency of design implementation across teams, as well as documentation to help maintain visibility and understanding of the web UI across the engineering team.
• Making and enforcing key decisions around naming conventions, project structure, and coding standards, to improve developer experience and quality consistency.

With the architectural vision and roadmap defined, I then began leading the implementation of the new architecture.

This initially involved a lot of hands-on work to set up the architecture of the web implementation of the Toolbox design system. I worked closely with a working group of designers and developers to plan and execute the implementation, building a scalable and maintainable architecture that could support the needs of the various web projects.

I also worked with other engineers to help them understand and adopt the new technology and workflows. Holding workshops and providing support where needed. We began migrating existing web projects to the new architecture, and building new projects using the modernised stack.

Overall, my time at hipages so far has been a rewarding challenge, and I'm proud of the progress we've made in modernising the front end architecture and improving the developer experience.