Micro Front Ends the ITHAKA Way with Jay Kent
“One of my top reasons for staying at ITHAKA is just the people,” says Jay Kent, Lead Software Engineer for UI at ITHAKA. “I’ve been here since 2010. I don’t know if I’ve worked with anyone I didn’t like. Everyone is so open and collaborative, and really embraces the learning aspect of our mission.”
Kent says one of his previous workplaces was rigid and egotistical, and they didn’t have a culture that embraced learning or admitting when you didn’t know something. “The fact that I don’t see that here and we’re not advertiser driven makes the work environment less cutthroat,” he says. “We’re open to working together and open to new ideas from the bottom up rather than the top down. Any engineer can go to a conference or see something online and bring it to the group and go through a process of implementing that from micro front ends to GraphQL.”
Micro Front Ends at ITHAKA
“Micro front ends,” Kent says. “This is something I remember hearing at a conference quite a while ago. I had conversations with a colleague about what that might be able to do. When Shucha Grover came on at ITHAKA, several teammates and I researched the idea on what micro front ends could do for us. We looked at what was out there, took some online courses and decided it was worthwhile to try. That’s when our front-end UI team took it on and built the foundation of what micro front ends are and how we can apply it in practice.”
So what are micro front ends at ITHAKA? “Micro front ends means breaking up a user interface into separately deployable pieces of a webpage,” Kent explains. “In our old way of doing things, a page or several pages were all tied into a single deployment where, because of our product team breakdown, multiple teams could be responsible for parts of a page. That caused blockages. Micro front ends breaks up a page with three teams involved, and each team can work on their part of a page and not step on each other’s toes.” One person changes a header, another makes a recommendation for content, and so on, and you can iterate and deploy without blocking each other.
What happens when something unexpected comes up? Kent says he enjoys the ITHAKA culture when it comes to addressing problems with micro front ends, because they had several different ideas about how this could be approached. They did several proofs of concept (POC) and then had a group discussion about different approaches. The teams discussed what they liked, and decided together on a logical direction forward. It’s this collaborative culture that he says drew him to ITHAKA and led him to stay for years. “It’s not something you see in every tech company out there. Also, having practices to back up the stated organizational value of teamwork and our commitment to learning overall makes the whole thing really work.”
A Culture of Collaborative Decision Making
“What is important for people to know about what it’s like to work at ITHAKA, is that our approach reflects our values,” Kent says. “We asked ‘what is micro front ends?’ and put a definition around it, looked at solutions in the industry vs. inventing our own, and narrowed down our options. Then we broke off into groups to get POCs in a place to walk through. We then collaborated on the pros and cons of each.”
Kent explains that the benefit of micro front ends is more than avoiding stepping on the toes of other teams working in parallel. These adjustments to a website can improve user experience and deliver better results when users search ITHAKA’s websites for educational materials.
Are there limits to how collaborative this process can be? “The difficulty might be a situation where no one is willing to step out and say we need to go this route and be the final decision maker,” he says. It is critical that teams using micro front ends be empowered to make decisions and speak up so that this process works effectively.
How can a team address the risks of coordinating with other teams making decisions on so many different issues? “If there is a new business model or product we’re trying to do as an organization, our teams are siloed in specific products (Search vs. User Sign-On). When we do get to the cross-team part, each team wanting to take ownership of their own part could potentially cause us to miss out on service-level contracts not being honored requiring one team or another to do rework,” he says.
So why is it worthwhile? In short, because this teamwork approach is driving better outcomes and creating more value for users. “At least for me it’s worth it,” Kent says, “because I can be a part of the technical direction for an aspect of the organization and not just a guy in a seat anyone can sit in and do what they’re told.”
Are you interested in learning more about micro front ends and the technology and processes used at ITHAKA? Check out ITHAKA’s engineering job openings.
