Nathan Affleck

Finance Report Generator

Skills used

  • Typescript
  • SCSS/CSS
  • Svelte
  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • UI/UX

Summary

On this project I worked on frontend, UI/UX and application-side development. The project required careful UI/UX considerations for complex data systems, as well as professional templating and branding consistent with a pre-existing manual PDF system.

What Went Well

  • Wireframed a complex application to get the interface MVP established.
  • Implemented and polished the design, consistent with branding for the application shell and pages.
  • Added new features for general data management, a template editor with live preview to be passed to the generation step.
  • Setup support for Chart.js for charts/graphs in reports.
  • Created several CRUD pages across the application to handle a range of data sources.
  • Introduced the data compilation into the frontend communicating closely with my backend-focused colleagues.

What I Learned

  • Effective task prioritization under tight time constraints.
  • Resilience and the ability to change approaches effectively, with one example being the pivot to Chart.js after discovering significant undocumented limitations in the originally selected library.
  • Ability to quickly learn and apply new technologies to deliver results, demonstrated through using PHP for the first time in this project.
  • Strong team communication to coordinate development efforts and integrate system components.

What I’d Improve

  • When inheriting technical decisions, make independent assessments of libraries to understand their limitations.

  • When inheriting code, analyze previous decisions to understand their reasoning, as you may encounter the same challenges.