Bespoke ERP/CRM system

One of the larger multi-year projects, close to half a million lines of code!

More information

This was a rather complicated system for one of the clients, which involved work over multiple years, both on the continued maintenance of the system, as well as developing entirely new modules for it altogether. While many companies out there might attempt to customize an existing system for their needs, like Oodoo for example, there's also lots of value in doing the opposite - making the system adapt to your business and its needs, fully.

What I did

In this project, I did a bit of everything. What initially started as fixing bugs, eventually lead to developing new features and working on those new modules. There was also plenty of refactoring and performance optimization to be done in the codebase, there were CI/CD improvements to be done. Eventually the app was containerized for stability and I was also responsible for upgrading multiple of its components to more recent and secure versions.

What I learnt

That said, even if a system generates a lot of value, inevitably it's going to turn into a "platform" instead of a "service", which might bring lots of complexity and sometimes dated approaches to things. This is especially troubling, when your opinions about how to do things might differ from those of other developers, for example, the system using HTML for formatting messages within it (which not only causes concerns over sanitization, but also things like how consistent the display of these messages is) instead of Markdown and that's one of the smaller aspects! Depending on how things are done, such work might unfortunately eventually end up untenable for many.