As content for these applications still needs to be customizable by non-dev people, it all comes from the CMS.

In our company, we use HyGraph CMS which exposes high-performant GraphQL API which I consume on the front end using Apollo Client. As these applications are static, when the content on the CMS changes, we need to rebuild the app again using the latest data from the CMS.

Thus, I set up Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines using HyGraph WebHooks, Azure Functions as a middleman and GitHub Actions workflows that go through all the tests, rebuild the app and deploy it to the hosting platform.

For more complex web apps, I use Next.js 13 and a state management tool called Redux.

All the applications I build for LetsStopAIDS, have a certain amount of animations of different complexity - some of them are super basic and some are very tricky to implement. When it comes to adding those animations to our projects, I rely on two main libraries: GSAP and Framer Motion.

Recently, I had the chance to hire a couple of high school students for cooperative work at our company. After interviewing about 10 candidates, I chose two students. Now, my role has transformed into that of a mentor. It's not always easy, but teaching others means I have to dive even deeper into the subjects I already know, and it's a very valuable experience.
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Initially, my responsibilities included implementing REST and GraphQL APIs for internal company use using FastAPI and PostGraphile, and I also provided support to other developers working on data connectors and synchronizers.

A few months into my time at the company, I received a fascinating assignment: managing web scraping. While this was also uncharted territory for me, I quickly picked up the necessary skills and soon became the go-to person for web scraping for the remainder of my time at Trade X.

We relied on a platform called Apify, which streamlined and accelerated the web scraping process and offered a range of useful features, such as storage and proxies. I primarily used Playwright and Scrapy to write scraping scripts, though, on occasion, Selenium in combination with Beautiful Soup came into play.

The company was scraping data from over 140 car listing websites worldwide, and I was tasked with maintaining all of them. I collaborated with other team members to ensure data quality and standardization.

During my work on this project, I uncovered a critical bug in the system that was causing excessive costs and data duplication. The issue was that some scraping jobs took only an hour to complete, while others took 3-4 hours or even days, particularly when dealing with websites containing an extensive number of listings.

For jobs that were completed in less than 6-7 hours, everything worked fine. However, for longer jobs, the process restarted from the beginning after a certain period (which wasn't specified in Apify's documentation, but based on my observation, it seemed to be around 6-7 hours). This meant that the same data was scraped again, leading to data duplication.

As a result, some jobs took weeks to finish, and in rare cases, even months, resulting in unnecessary expenditures. Upon reporting this bug to my manager, I took on the task of finding a solution. My approach involved saving the IDs of listings that had already been scraped into Apify's Internal Storage, which was not erased after container termination.

This approach allowed me to check whether a listing needed to be scraped and helped us avoid duplicates, improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Another challenging task for me was working with AWS OpenSearch (ElasticSearch). My manager wanted me to transfer all the data we had (which was about 80 million+ entry points) to ElasticSearch and use Kibana to build a dashboard that was presented to the CEO of the company on a weekly basis.

In order to achieve this goal, I worked extensively with these 3 AWS Services: AWS RDS (Postgres) which we used as our primary database, AWS ElasticSearch, and AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) which allowed me to seamlessly migrate data from RDS to ElasticSearch.

It was an amazing seven months filled with challenging but very interesting work, and I am truly grateful that I took this opportunity.

One of the most challenging tasks I took on during my tenure was the creation of an e-commerce page. It marked my introduction to Redux, the state management library I employed to handle all state manipulations within the application. I also invested time in acquainting myself with the PayPal SDK, which we leveraged for payment processing.

To seamlessly integrate this functionality into the React application, I harnessed the power of Netlify Functions, which under the hood are simply AWS Lambda Functions. In just one month, I successfully built and rigorously tested the e-commerce page using PayPal's sandbox environment, making it ready for user access.

It was the first time, when something that I built brought value to the company because, in the first month after launching the e-commerce page, KellyKinetix increased their revenue by 19% from merchandise sales.

And last, but not least, why my experience at this small organization was so valuable to me is the fact that it was the first time for me when I was sort of leading and managing a small team of developers. Three months after I joined KellyKinetix, two other developers joined the team, and as someone who worked a little longer at this place as well as someone who had more experience with React and web development in general, I took the role of a lead developer and was managing our small group of three developers.

My experience at KellyKinetix was truly invaluable, as it not only enhanced my skills but also broadened my horizons.

I was mostly on my own during this job, which forced me to learn how to solve problems and teach myself new things. There were other developers on the team, but they were in a different time zone, so getting help from them meant waiting for a long time.

Looking back, even though it wasn't the perfect job, I learned a lot. It taught me how to be self-reliant and handle challenges.