Work / alluraDirect
A React onboarding wizard inside a legacy Java platform
I started the React codebase inside a late-2000s Spring Boot platform and shipped a multistep, save-and-resume onboarding flow. It shipped, and it moved no numbers.
- Role
- React developer, with team-lead duties
- When
- 2019 – 2022
- Stack
- ReactTypeScriptReact QueryRedux ToolkitJava / Spring Boot (host)CypressJestGitHub Actions
- Planned vs actual
- 12 weeks → ~1.5 years
- Measured
- New sign-ups attributable
- None measured
- Unmeasured
The situation
alluraDirect is a vacation-rental platform for property managers at BC ski resorts, built on a Java/Spring Boot platform from the late 2000s. Every new property manager was onboarded by hand, by the CEO. The team when I arrived was the CEO, the CTO and a bookkeeper; I talked my way in with a month's trial and was hired at the end of it.
What I built
- Started the React app inside the legacy codebase and owned its architecture: state management, data fetching (I introduced React Query), and reusable hooks across the codebase.
- Did the onboarding research and wireframes, designed how onboarding segments group together, and built the multistep save-and-resume wizard that replaced the manual process.
- Built the Owner Dashboard calendar and reservation tools in React, Redux Toolkit and TypeScript.
- Set up CI running Cypress end-to-end and Jest integration tests through GitHub Actions.
Leading without the title
I was never officially team lead, but I did the job for a frontend team of three: designed the interview process and hired two developers, ran sprint planning, retros and code review, ran Jira, and wrote the internal documentation the company aligned on.