Cash Converters: Migrating from no-framework and Code Igniter to Symfony in 1 day
What a starting of the year! We are happy to welcome Cash Converters into the Rigor Guild customer family. Wow, the family is getting big 🥰.
Cash Converters is the only global franchise specialized in buying and selling second-hand items. Founded in 1984, this multinational company originally from Australia has established itself in its sector, thanks to its refined and proven know-how with more than 500 stores around the world. It is an absolutely innovative concept, which has revolutionized the second-hand market around the world.
Cash Converters was established in Spain in December 1995 with a pilot store in Barcelona, ​​which had great success since its opening and an extraordinary reception among the media. It currently has 88 stores distributed throughout the National Territory and 6 stores in Portugal. They are leaders in Second Hand.
His CIO, Carlos Borlaf, who recently joined Cash Converters approach me sharing the technical challenges his team was facing. With a team of around 40 people, 88 stores with a hybrid environment (AWS cloud and on-premise deployment), they need to work toward a more customer-centric business by increasing retention and repetition. They still have legacy applications they are migrating but wanted to accelerate.
After the NDA signature, initial code analysis, and discussions with the team, Christian Soronellas, and Carlos Buenosvinos, we planned a 3 days workshop and went to Málaga.
First Day: Event-Driven Architecture crash course, define the Cash Converters development guidelines, identify quick wins to apply, and how to implement them.
Second Day: Explain how to migrate to Symfony using PSR-7 and PSR-15 (you have some repository examples in https://github.com/rigorguild/framework-to-framework-migration). Crash course on Hexagonal Architecture and Testing. Refactor live in Mob programming mode. Review monitoring, deployment, and control version strategies.
Third Day: Review Context Mapping and Team organization, and long Hackathon with three goals: stack Symfony in all the apps, migrate some use cases into Hexagonal with testing and add monitoring with Sentry.
At the end of the third day, the 4 topmost important Cash Converters applications were able to handle requests in Symfony 5 and had a use case refactored into Hexagonal Architecture and unit tested. Two weeks later, one of the apps is already in production. As always, all the three days content is available for the whole team privately on Youtube.
If you work in the Málaga area and you are looking for a job as a developer, Cash Converters has tons of tech challenges and the best attitude and mindset to fix them all. So, join them and learn while having fun with such an amazing crew. Take a look at their open positions on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/cash-converters-espana/jobs/).
I would like to personally thank Carlos Borlaf, Luchiana Brodela, Pedro Acuña, and Jose Antonio Molina for the fantastic attitude towards improving and the love they gave us during the three days in Malaga. Christian Soronellas and I will follow carefully the team and project evolution.
