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 work was split the way it often is on a project that size, with the front end (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and the back end (the PHP and Symfony side) sitting with different people. Vue had been introduced but hadn't been extended much past its first component yet, and the integration decisions that would let it spread across the rest of the platform were the sort that need someone looking at both sides at once.

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 so it would scale across the rest of the platform rather than needing rework every time it went somewhere new. 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, and by the end I owned the front-end integration across the dashboard and the deployment pipeline that shipped it. 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.