In Blade Runner, there are replicants. In Under The Skin, a member of an extraterrestrial species possesses someone to take on a human form.
This is a tried and true trope in science fiction books and movies. Something or someone may appear to be identical to its “natural” counterpart, but beneath the surface, it is not. Whether it’s a clone, an android or something entirely unfamiliar, these creations can often remain undetected to passersby but can be detected to the trained eye.
Science fiction may note capture everyone’s imaginations equally, but there’s a reason the genre’s classics have an enduring legacy.
Many of these pieces of media are generally based in a distant, dystopian future in which high-tech counterparts are seen as antagonists, but reflect something about the nature of coding. While a website’s user experience and appearance may be similar to another website, they can be built on entirely different languages and frameworks beneath the hood.
At Prizeout, the platform’s first iteration used Angular 1 as the framework to optimize for speed. Eventually, it needed to be migrated to React to support new features and security updates. For Prizeout users, this meant receiving an improved, more secure experience. But for the company’s engineering team, this major undertaking demanded refactoring and tight collaboration.
Built In NYC spoke to Prizeout CTO and Co-Founder Brendan Grove to learn more about how his team approached the challenge and what became the final result of these diligent efforts.
Ad-tech company Prizeout gives customers across 11 industries more options, purchasing power and faster access to funds.
What’s the biggest technical challenge you’ve faced recently in your work? What made this particular challenge so tricky?
When Prizeout first started, we needed to optimize for speed. That meant defaulting to languages and frameworks the early engineers knew well to build a scalable, compliant and complex product quickly. This led to our team using Angular 1 as the framework for our front end.
However, the framework was getting old and was no longer being actively supported, which meant we were missing out on new features and security updates. We also wanted a framework that would allow us to scale our team, as we recently more than doubled our consumer engineering team.
How did you and your team overcome this challenge in the end? What were some of the specific tools or technologies you used?
After careful consideration, we decided to migrate to React.
The migration process was no small task. We needed to completely rebuild the application from the ground up and ensure the refactor would work for future features while still maintaining and building elements in the current system (we are still a startup that needs to ship features!). Consumers were still using the current product, of course, and we needed to continue to scale our user base.
We worked tirelessly to rewrite our code and get everything up and running on the new framework. We encountered our fair share of challenges along the way. Still, we were always able to find solutions and keep the project moving forward through a tight collaboration between product, design and other engineers. Transferring institutional knowledge isn’t always so easy!
We were always able to find solutions and keep the project moving forward.’’
How did this technical challenge help you grow as an engineer or help you strengthen a specific skill?
Finally, after months of hard work, the migration was complete. We were proud of what we had accomplished and were excited to see how the new tech stack would perform in the real world. Now came the real test: developing a rollout strategy at scale that wouldn’t interrupt any of the current consumer experiences.
As it turned out, the migration was a huge success. The new application was faster and more responsive than ever before, and we could deliver new features and updates at a much faster pace. The customers even noticed the difference.
We learned a lot from the migration process, and new and existing engineers on the team were grateful to have had the opportunity to modernize our tech stack.
