Nature.House

Five years, one platform, rebuilt from the inside — and I was there for all of it. When I joined Nature.House in 2019 as the only front-end developer, the codebase was a collection of raw JavaScript files loaded as sequential script tags with no bundler, no transpilation, and no asset pipeline. Symfony translations were made available to JavaScript by dumping the entire dictionary into the page: 27 MB of translation files on every request, regardless of what the page needed. On mobile, the site took 12–14 seconds before anything was usable. **From zero to Webpack to Vite — and eliminating 27 MB of JS** My first task was introducing Webpack, the project's first ever build system. Beyond bundling, I solved the translation problem at its root: translations are now injected at build time — only the keys a specific page actually uses — bringing the 27 MB payload to zero entirely. Combined with image optimisation and general front-end cleanup, mobile load time dropped from 12–14 seconds to 0.7 seconds. In 2023 we migrated from Webpack to Vite, significantly improving build speed and the daily developer experience. **150-component Storybook design system** The core multi-year project was replacing a bespoke jQuery stack with native HTML Web Components in TypeScript. Each component was designed and built in complete isolation inside Storybook — unit tested, integration tested, visually documented — then imported into the Symfony application as a standalone package. By the time I left, the design system contained around 150 components. Every component was verifiably correct before reaching production, and the library shipped independently of the host application. **Storyblok headless CMS — marketing autonomy at scale** I integrated Storyblok as a headless CMS across all search landing pages and the full homepage structure. Every section is a drag-and-drop block in the Storyblok editor, backed by a live preview integration. The marketing team can build, rearrange, and publish pages entirely without developer involvement — managing SEO content and page layout on their own schedule. **Continuous framework upgrades — Symfony 2 to 8, PHP 5.6 to 8.3** The platform started on Symfony 2 and PHP 5.6. In 2020, we completed the first major leap to Symfony 4 — a migration that required rewriting approximately 50% of the application. That wasn't a one-off: the team has continued upgrading to stay current, reaching Symfony 8.0 and PHP 8.3. I coordinated the front-end side of these migrations while keeping the product continuously running. **From zero tests to 95%+ code coverage** When I joined, there was no automated test suite anywhere in the front-end codebase — no unit tests, no end-to-end tests, nothing. I initiated and led the transition to a full testing culture: E2E tests covering all core booking flows, smoke tests across all major pages, and unit tests for every feature. By the time I left, front-end code coverage was above 95% across all repositories. **Monthly releases to deploy-on-every-MR** When I started, a production release happened once a month: code frozen, manually QA'd on staging, then deployed. We moved the infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform and built a GitLab CI pipeline that takes a merged MR straight to production automatically. The release cycle went from monthly to every single merge request. **Solr to Elasticsearch, and a complete rebrand** Search was migrated from Solr to Elasticsearch, which resolved serious performance issues Solr was experiencing at the scale of Nature.House's inventory. Alongside all of this, Nature.House underwent a full rebrand — new logo, a completely new color palette, and new typography — which I led on the front-end, rolling out the new identity through the design system and into the live platform simultaneously. **Growing a team from scratch** I joined as the only front-end developer, paired with a backend team of two. Over five years I helped grow the organisation to four additional front-end engineers, four backend developers, a UI designer, a product owner, and a QA engineer. I led hiring, conducted interviews, mentored junior and mid-level developers, and collaborated directly with the product owner on roadmap priorities.