overview
Joined Ably as a senior frontend engineer on the corporate website team. The project was ambitious: refactor a legacy Ruby on Rails codebase to adopt React and Tailwind CSS while simultaneously rolling out a full rebrand of Ably's corporate identity.
The team operated with a strong culture of paired programming, self-testing and peer review — every PR was reviewed by at least one other engineer before merge, and code was expected to arrive with tests.
After seven months, I transferred laterally to the Developer Relations team to take on the Developer Education role.
what i did
React and Tailwind migration
Refactored legacy ERB/Rails view templates to React components styled with Tailwind CSS. This was an active, in-flight rebrand — design and engineering were running in parallel, requiring constant coordination and flexibility as design decisions evolved.
Documentation platform
Heavily involved in the documentation platform, which ran on Nanoc and Textile. Contributed to the architecture of the docs pipeline, improving build times and developer experience for the content team.
Ghost blog and Gatsby CMS
Maintained and extended the Ably engineering blog on Ghost, and worked with a Gatsby-based CMS (backed by Contentful) for structured marketing content.
Paired programming culture
Worked closely with colleagues in daily pair sessions. This reinforced consistent code patterns across the codebase and accelerated onboarding of new engineers.