Coding for a Sustainable Marketplace
By Max Bonhomme
I’m Max, a Full Stack Developer working at Everpress. Everpress a global curated marketplace with the goal of promoting independent creativity while eliminating risk and waste.
I started as a Front End Engineer in a web agency after graduation. I was mainly working on marketing websites and experimental experiences for small to medium sized businesses. After working for 2 years with this company I made the switch to freelance where I worked with many different types of clients, from working directly with designers or small agencies to working with bigger businesses like Dropbox or Netflix. It was a really fun experience — I met a lot of great people, worked on some great projects and learnt a few different skills along the way like client relations, account management and business operations.
After 4 years of freelancing it was time for me to join a company that I believed in and where I could be part of a great team of doers to help drive the business upwards. That’s why I joined Everpress, which helps creators be more independent and bring them closer to their community whilst having a strong focus on sustainability in a world of dead stock and abundant waste.
We work closely together within the tech team to bring new features to the ecommerce experience or updating existing parts of the site, from revisiting the checkout flow to improving the UX on the creators dashboard to adding a new filtering system on the shop page.
We also work cross-functionally between all departments to try and make everyone’s life easier, we automate a lot of the production teams day to day tasks so that they can focus on more important things. We fix bugs that users share with customer support and we keep open communication so that everyone stays up to date with how the business is going and what is needed to improve things.
On a day to day basis we start with a short standup to talk about our current tasks and anything that might be blocking another team member. During each sprint we usually have a mix of new features, improvements and bugs to work on. We mainly use React and CSS Modules for the frontend and Symfony for the backend which are very flexible and perfect for our use case. We release our work twice a week and often talk about how we could improve our code base (new technologies, improving documentation) or in our workflow so we never stay still and always improve as a team.
One thing I learned throughout the years is that as a developer you have to be lazy. The less you write the better, if you’re re-using the same code over and over there’s a way to make it more efficient or to automate it.
The key is to write clean and readable code, use variable and method names that make sense, you should be able to read the code and not decrypt it. Doing that will help you understand your code if you come back to it 2 months after but more importantly it will help your team members understand and update your work.
Tools and Programming Languages I Use
- VSCode
- PHPStorm
- Docker
- AWS
- Tuple (for pair programming).HTML & CSS
- Javascript
- PHP
- SQL
When not coding you can find me hiking or windsurfing.
