COMPANY
Spark, Auckland, New Zealand
PROJECT
Spark New Zealand had a line of product that offered on-demand video streaming to consumers. The service consist of a vast collection of latest TV shows, movie rentals and kids shows that consumers can watch across any device including big screens, tablets or even smartphones.
TECHNOLOGY STACK
- JavaScript
- React
- Redux
- Node.js
- GraphQL
- HTML/CSS
- Google Analytics
- MongoDB
- Continuous Integration and Deployment
- Authentication
- Responsive Web
THE GOALS
I worked in the capacity of full-stack software engineer with the video streaming team.
- Ship frequent new features so the company could promote high viewer engagement.
- Long pending bugs needed to be prioritized and fixed.
- Adopt new platform and work on the migration of existing REST APIs to GraphQL.
- Fast and frequent releases cycles with a sprint cadence.
THE APPROACH
- Worked on some of the impactful bugs to improve usability, caching and faster load times for the viewers.
- Worked closely with the Product team, gathered feature requirements and prioritized development effort.
- Took the approach of Atomic Design Principles and built reusable React components based on the design.
- Adopted Responsive Web Design fundamentals when building new components across multiple screens.
- Developed and released small incremental features, took user feedback and reiterated. This helped in maintaining a decent release cadence.
- Performed beta testing of new features on multiple screen sizes.
THE RESULTS
- Long pending bugs related to performance, caching, UI and backend services were fixed. There was a significant drop in user complains.
- Developed, migrated and shipped this new show page for TV shows, movies and kids shows.
- Kickstarted the work for migrating existing API work to GraphQL.