Chimnie

In late August of 2021 I became a "Chimner", a group of people that wanted to change the house market by developing a "LinkedIn for houses". As part of a senior fullstack developer in the product team my duties included implementing designs, and features in VueJS and later React, manage the application state with Redux and later Zustand, by utilising Material-UI components & Typescript. I was also a main contributor in the backend codebase, providing API layers built with NestJS (Typescript) while adjusting and improving the CI/CD & GitHub workflows of the platform. The infrastructure was hosted on GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) and later on AWS. Another key part of this project was the extensive E2E testing suite that we wrote on Playwright.

Later on, the application was rebuilt with NextJS to enable Server Side Rendering, improve the Web Vitals and the SEO performance of the indexed properties. The development of Chimnie was completed in August 2023.

Architecture

TypeScript ran through the whole platform, from Vue and later React on the frontend to the NestJS modules behind it, so types and conventions carried from one side to the other. It ran on Kubernetes, first on GKE and later on AWS. The move to Next.js was about the property pages: rendering them on the server gives search engines the full HTML of every property and improves the Web Vitals, which a client-rendered app can't do. The Playwright suite was the safety net that made those migrations possible without breaking existing flows.

See the full project at chimnie.page.