Privalia Venta Directa
Background
Working for a smaller consulting firm often gives you the opportunity to collaborate on larger projects where extra resources are needed. That's how I arrived at Privalia, working efficiently as a front-end developer with extensive HTML&CSS capabilities, but at the time, zero Javascript experience.
Privalia is one of the best examples of growing Spanish start-ups that have climbed the e-commerce ranks in a short period of time, reaching up to +200K daily visits and 20K simultaneous peaks.
Process
When I arrived at Privalia, I found a young and disorganized company housing a "maintenance hell" within its structure. They have 4 different front-end platforms for 4 different countries. The first checkpoint we met was the release of Privalia Mexico, followed by huge improvements in Privalia Italy. But the biggest challenge was the development of a complete Ajax based common framework that could unify the front-end platform for all the countries.
Prototype was the Javascript library that was chosen, and with its massive Object Oriented capabilities we developed a large framework from scratch, conforming to a rapid pace which resulted in daily growth. It was a great experience and feel honored to have been part of such an amazing front-end team.
My Role
At first, I was responsible for developing maintenance tasks, later getting involved in newer features until I entered a freshly started common front-end developing group. From that time on, the majority of my efforts were devoted to Javascript, through which I learned optimal practices, design patterns and e-commerce usability tricks.
Later, I was in charge of several modules, including sharing features and web analytics modules (Google Analytics and Omniture).
