Hello! My name is Arjan Jassal.

I joined Taloflow's tight-knit team as their first frontend engineer. Part of my role was to decide what tech to use, how to structure things, and to get an MVP up and running a.s.a.p. Like most startups, trade-offs and prioritization were key when it came to shipping on time.

With that in mind, I choose to use tech I was very familiar with like React, Styled Components, and Firebase, and some tech I'd never used but wanted to, like TypeScript. This way I could still progress quickly and keep things interesting by learning something new.

Highlights

• Building a themed dashboard with TypeScript and Styled Components
• Using gRPC protocol on the web for client-server communication
• Utilizing Node.js to build a Slack a integration
• Collaborating with amazing backend engineers and product designers

I joined Grow's team of 4 engineers while the company was still focused on a direct-to-consumer model. At the time, Grow's competition was banks and credit unions across Canada. Shortly after joining, Grow pivoted to a SaaS model, and now their competition were customers. This brought a slew of challenges to the engineering team, like making our existing product white-labeled and modular so that it could be highly scalable across all customers. As you could imagine, a lot of discussions around what to refactor to fit this new business model were had, along with what to rewrite from a blank slate and the pros and cons of each option.

The next 2 years were spent utilizing React, Redux, Styled Components, and many other great tools in the JavaScript ecosystem to build the UI that powered Grow's modular products. I also helped build out the frontend team by interviewing countless candidates and taking part in refining Grow's interview process.

Grow also didn't have any product designers, so myself and another frontend engineer designed all products and old marketing websites. This was a fun but challenging responsibilty because we had to thinking about the UX, UI, and code, so there was a lot of context switching, but also a lot of great experience wearing those different hats.

Highlights

• Architecting a modular white-labeled UI
• Shipping with some of Canada's largest banks and credit unions
• Experiencing a leadership role and mentoring junior team members
• Interviewing many engineers and understanding how hard interviewing is
• Speaking about how we use React at Vancouver Startup Week

Ettrics was my first real taste of being a frontend developer on a team with backend engineers and product designers. It was at Ettrics that I started as Web Designer and ended as a Frontend Developer. The key moment during this evolution was when I picked up Angular.js and started to intract with RESTful APIs that the backend devs were building. This way of working on the frontend was totally different than the static websites I was used to building, and I loved it.

Highlights

• Working remotely and communicating with people through Slack
• Started building apps with JavaScript instead of marketing websites
• Someone showed me how to use Git properly

PerfectMind offered me my first real job in the industry as a Web Designer, but it wasn't quite what I had imagined. I was part of a small web team that pumped out websites from a few depressing templates that looked like they were designed in 1999. Along with outdated designs, the tech being used to build the websites was just as old. To sum it up, it was just plain old HTML and CSS.

I saw this as a great opportunity to introduce the team to things like build tools, and pre-processors to make development easier and more effective. Being able to split your HTML, and CSS into different files and then process them into a single file was pretty cool back then, and it made website development a lot easier. The team was receptive to using these new tools, so that was cool. The next thing I focused on was creating new website templates that looked more modern and up to date with what I know about design and user experience, along with adding some spice using JavaScript.

Highlights

• Experienced what it's like to build web things for a living
• Taught co-workers modern tools (at the time) like Gulp, SCSS, etc...