Patience pays off. Six years with one application.

Starting point

An application for financial advisors that another team had been building for six months. Angular, Node.js, MongoDB. Unfinished features, unstructured data, weak typing, and code nobody could read.

What we did

E2E tests first. They pinned down how the application behaved and gave us the freedom to change it. Then we rewrote the backend in Python, Django, and PostgreSQL. It took two months. Since then, agile development has been running with a product owner on the client's side.

Users were skeptical at first and progress wasn't linear. Internal ambassadors in the advisor network, the people we worked with most closely, helped win their trust.

Result

FINfest 2021 Application of the Year. The standard tool of the KAPITOL advisor network. The client has invested roughly a million dollars in it since 2019, and development continues.

What we learned

• Automated tests are the foundation of serious software, not an add-on.
• Small commits, TypeScript everywhere, generated typed API clients, a monorepo, feature flags.
• RxJS and NgRx: powerful tools with a considerable price. We use them deliberately.
• Steady long-term progress is worth more than speed at the start.

“You'll have a good time working with them.”

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