Lynn Romich

Konbini is a SaaS project I started with a few goals in mind:

• Build a cool product that genuinely helps people build stuff and/or get their work done.
• Level up my engineering skills by personally architecting and building a fairly ambitious project from scratch.
• In the same vein, learn more about business development and marketing by building, marketing and maintaining/growing a SaaS product completely by myself.
• (Hopefully!) establish a new, independent income stream for myself that isn’t contingent on employment or client work.

…and while it’s definitely turned out to be more work than I’d initially bargained for (what doesn’t?), I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out.

The tech stack is full-stack TypeScript with Node.js as the serverside runtime. The app consists of a number of containerized services deployed to Google Cloud Platform (primarily Cloud Run), and heavily relying on asynchronous communication via Cloud Pub/Sub.

Other tooling and miscellaneous tech choices include:

• Docker (with Docker Compose in development)
• MySQL (with Vitess via PlanetScale in production)
• Redis
• GraphQL (a public, extensively-documented GraphQL API is a core feature of the product)
• React with Next.js (marketing site, dashboard app, and merchant UI)
• Netlify (marketing site)
• Tailwind CSS

I worked with DataCamp for about six months on a contract basis, writing mostly frontend code with TypeScript, React and Next.js. During this time, I worked with their existing team to help maintain and iterate on their public-facing web properties (i.e. everything on datacamp.com).

This included communication with stakeholders, code reviews, managing the software development process using Jira and GitHub, as well as implementing designs built in Figma by the design team.

At Infostud, I had the opportunity to work at one of the largest internet companies in Serbia, contributed to the development of greenfield projects across the entire stack, and was occasionally responsible for maintenance of legacy code, as part of the team(s) behind Poslovi Infostud and HR Lab — the leading platforms for job seekers and employers in Serbia.

Tech-wise, I mainly worked with PHP and JavaScript/TypeScript, and deployed (non-legacy) code as container images to an internal Kubernetes cluster.

Some of the things I did in my time at Infostud include:

• Worked on the rewrite of Infostud's ATS product (now HR Lab Assistant) using modern tech like PHP >= 7, React, GraphQL, Docker, and Kubernetes. As of 2021, HR Lab Assistant was the most widely-used ATS software in Serbia.
• Built an internal payment platform that integrated with PayPal and NestPay (a proprietary payment gateway popular in the region) to enable HR Lab products to easily integrate credit card payments and other payment methods. When I was at Infostud, tens of thousands of dollars worth of payments passed through this system every month.
• Maintained poslovi.infostud.com, the leading job board in Serbia, with over 1 million monthly unique users.
• Built the then-current iteration of HRLab.rs, the website for the HR Lab brand, using React and Gatsby, improving site performance by 300% in the process. I also later migrated this site from Gatsby to Next.js, quickly enough that we didn't need to institute a feature freeze.
• Built CI/CD pipelines for the team's codebases using GitLab CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
• Built an OAuth 2.0 identity provider for the HR Lab platform, allowing HR Lab products to easily authenticate users through a central location.

(Note: Execom was merged into HTEC Group after my time there.)

I interned at Execom for about a month to fulfill a college requirement. While I was there, I was given multiple small full-stack and frontend projects to build by myself, using tech like PHP and AngularJS.