Pure Retirement

Project Overview

Pure Retirement brought me onto an existing team to help modernise the platform their brokers use day to day. It was built on Symfony (a PHP framework that handles the server side), and the plan was to bring Vue.js (a JavaScript framework for building interactive interfaces) in across the front end, so pages responded instantly instead of reloading for every action.

The trouble was structural. The work was split across two teams that weren't really talking to each other. One lived in the front end (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), the other owned the back end (the PHP and Symfony side), and neither had a full picture of what the other needed. So integration decisions kept getting kicked down the road, and the Vue work had stalled at a single component that only half worked. None of it was broken as such, it had just ground to a halt.

Being full-stack, I could sit in both conversations at once. I understood what the back-end team was building and what the front-end team needed out of it, so I could get the deferred decisions actually made. I cleared the bugs that had been blocking Vue from being extended, then built the integration properly so it could scale across the rest of the platform instead of being bolted on one component at a time. From there I rolled Vue out into every part of the dashboard that needed it, and brought in Tailwind CSS (a styling approach that keeps everything consistent rather than a pile of one-offs) to replace the styles that had accumulated over time. The deployment pipeline ran through Node and NPM (the tooling that builds and ships the front-end code), which I looked after alongside the rest.

I stayed on for about a year. Pure Retirement went through a fair bit of internal change in that time, and by the end I was the only developer left on the platform. What they were left with was a broker platform running as a proper dynamic application, Vue working consistently across the whole dashboard, and a clear pattern for how the front end and back end should talk to each other. That gave them something they could keep building on.