Introducing
Mallplaza.com Customer Website
Mallplaza is a huge Shopping Mall chain in Latin America, they are present in Colombia, Peru and Chile, they have more than 30 shopping malls and more than 5000 stores, I was hired to develop a new version of their website, the old one was developed with Drupal and Gatsby but it was very slow, so they decided to migrate to a static site generator, I was in charge of developing the new version of the website using Gatsby and Jamstack as well as Micro Frontends.
Since I was the most experienced developer in the team with the required technologies, I took the lead of the project to fill the gaps in the team; however I had the fortune to work with really talented developers that learned quickly how to easly add new features and components to the website, I also had the opportunity to work with a designer that was very open to new ideas and was always willing to help me with the design of the website.
At the begining I face fear from managers and stakeholders about the decision to refactor the website since they had invested a significant ammount of money on the previous project, but after a few weeks they understood that the problems were to big to be addressed and agreed that a refactor was needed.
The project was done using Gatsby, Gatsby themes, Gatsby cloud, contentful and Gitlab CI/CD, the website is hosted in Gatsby cloud and the content is managed in contentful, the website is fully responsive and uses lazy loading to improve the performance of the website coupled with Gatsby cloud incremental builds and uses micro frontends to load only the components that are needed for each page, this allows us to have a very small bundle size and a very fast website that is also cheap and easy to deploy and maintain.
Even tought Jean didnt enter as a tech lead or a manager, he was able to take the lead of the project and fill the gaps in the team, he was able to lead the team to deliver a great product in a short time, he also provided mentoring and guidance to the team members, he was always willing to help and share his knowledge with the team, he was a great asset to the project and the team.
Ramon Labbe, Falabella Enginering Manager
My milestones were:
train the team to use Gatsby and Gatsby themes.
Implement micro frontends to improve the performance of the website.
Implement a CI/CD pipeline using Gitlab CI/CD.
Implement a content management system using contentful.