Meet Our Product Development Teams: Midas
Team Midas owns the core areas of the Smartly.io app that handle campaign creation and management. Midas, like Senators, is a new team split from a large, old one that operated everything related to Facebook. “We are working with some of the oldest code in the house,” says Juha, the team lead for Midas. “It’s great to now have the bandwidth to fix some of the issues that have pained Smartlie developers for a long time.”
By chewing the old codebase into a more digestible form, Midas is building a foundation for scaling the app further as well as accelerating product development speed. “We’re slicing the legacy codebase into smaller, more manageable entities,” Juha explains. “We can’t shut the campaign engine down and wipe out the legacy code all at once. Instead, we have to refresh it piece-by-piece, without disrupting the ever-ongoing operations. It’s like doing brain surgery without anesthesia”.
A team of experienced developers
To accomplish this feat, team Midas is made up of very senior developers. “ Riikka, Grigorii, Iiro, Valentin, Oksana and Marko are all seniors with extensive expertise,” Juha says. “Put us all together and we have close to 100 years of software development experience in the team.” The team is now looking for a Backend Developer to help them improve the software architecture and build new services.
“It requires a lot of brainpower to plan a refactoring of a complex old codebase, and you have to have an archaeologist’s mindset,” Juha says. “Our work is interlinked with that of many other development teams, most importantly with Bobby Tables, Senators, and Top Gun, which means that we have to be mindful of the possible repercussions of our actions. And it only gets more difficult as we’re done with the low-hanging fruits and proceed to the trickier parts of the old codebase.”
Something old, something new
When they aren’t tearing down the old PHP codebase, Midas works with React, JavaScript, and TypeScript. “Our app is in the middle of a transformation, where most of the campaign editing features are moving from the original campaign overview into our new reporting tool. Midas has a key role in packaging the campaign data neatly so it’s easier for the other team to manage within reporting,” Juha recounts. “At the same time, we’re pruning the old features and functionalities, carefully assessing which ones we could do away with to simplify the app structure.”
Midas is currently aiming to fully revamp the campaign creation and management functionality. “We’re now building user prototypes for the new implementation and finishing up basic architectural components on the backend,” Juha says. “The plan is to verify our interaction models with the prototype and then go full steam ahead starting in April.”
Learn more about being a developer at Smartly.io: smartly.io/careers/developers.
Originally published at https://www.smartly.io.
