Previous experience | Danijel Grabež

Sesame, building America’s superstore for great doctors and specialists at an affordable price.

I joined the product team at Sesame as a Software Engineer to help build an impactful and unique marketplace that provides easy and affordable access to high-quality health care. I currently help improve the membership experience and make sure our platform stays reliable by working collaboratively with peers from our governance guild. Some of my latest efforts involve improving our analytic infrastructure, exploring testing strategies, and ways to generate performance/a11y reports.

Technologies we use: NextJS, Microservices, GCP, GraphQL, TypeScript, Styled Components, Storybook, Jest, Cypress.

Kiron, moving to Germany and helping to build a social learning platform for underserved communities.

I moved from Novi Sad to Berlin to join the product team at Kiron. As a Software Developer, my focus was mainly on product foundations and API development. To help shape the product accordingly, I have participated in conducting experiments with online campaigns and user testings. In addition to product-focused goals, I helped expanding our development team by interviewing and onboarding new team members. My latest efforts involved building a white-label platform for our corporate clients and backend migration from Laravel to NodeJS.

Used technologies: Docker, Node, Laravel, PosgtreSQL, GraphQL, React, Flow, Emotion, Storybook, Jest, Cypress.

Rapid Development

Although a reasonably small team, we manage to perform high without affecting a healthy work-life balance. Well-defined processes across the organization, with optimized tooling, have certainly contributed to that challenge!

UI Architecture

When I joined Kiron, one of my main challenges was to make our codebase up-to-date with latest trends. This effort involved improving tooling, migrating the existing codebase to Emotion with more scalable UI architecture, and collaborating with the design team to develop our internal design system.

I was also responsible for improving testing strategies. For this matter, we replaced our Enzyme configuration with React Testing Library and configured Cypress to work with our local database setup by replicating the base environment on every run.

Scaling Our Reach

Our major milestone for 2020 was to navigate our organization towards for-profit ventures. We noticed the world needs a social learning platform that would support online learners during the challenges imposed by the pandemic that is safe, secure, and well established.

During 2020 and 2021, we acquired several partners across the EU and enabled access to necessary learning materials to thousands of students.

Internationalization

We spent a fair amount of time providing multi-language support to our students. We made a particular effort to make our content properly presented for the RTL usage since a certain number of our users come from Arab countries.

Authentication

In early 2020, we decided to improve our authentication flows to enable our users easier access to the application with proper support when they lose their credentials.

Artificial Intelligence Courses

Search

We use Algolia to provide our users with fast and reliable results while exploring our platform. We decided to only expose a small part of our DB for security reasons, which proved to be a peculiar challenge for data syncing since we publish numerous courses daily.

3rd Party Integrations

We introduced various integrations to our platform: from enabling SSO connection for our partner universities, providing the creation of interactive learning materials via h5p, to improving student communication via Mattermost to name a few.

GraphQL and Business Layer

As one of the most exciting parts of my day-to-day responsibilities, I have the opportunity to work and improve our internal data modeling tool from which we can generate a back-office interface for our admin users. Also, this tool produces TypeScript types and optimized data loaders for more performant access to our database via GraphQL. To keep the business layer aligned to our future challenges, we heavily invested our efforts in finding ways to migrate our infrastructure from Laravel to Node.

Blueberry, remote adventures and exquisite Czech cuisine.

I served as a JavaScript Developer for Blueberry (acq. by BOOT!Q in 2019.), helping build many exciting internal and external products. Having the opportunity to work remotely, I managed to continually improve myself in challenges remote work entails, while occasionally visiting Prague’s office, for meeting new clients and tightening collaboration with Czech colleagues.

I was involved in defining project architecture and making decisions on the way the projects should evolve. I primarily worked on React, and React Native based projects. To evaluate the effectiveness of our software teams, and the craft of software development, we honed the points outlined in the Joel test and used bi-weekly agile sprints. We also experimented with various “fresh” technologies at that time, such as face-recognition and ReasonML.

Echo — In cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Internal Affairs, we developed a mobile application to involve the general public in the search for missing children.

Used technologies: React Native, GraphQL, AWS Serverless and Styled Components.

Panoram — React Native application which provides users to divide their panoramic picture into 2, 3, 4 or 5 parts into three easy steps. Created images are compatible with most social app stories, like Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook.

Image of Scrum Space project presentation

Scrum Space — We built Scrum space intending to make the scrum ceremonies easier and fun to use.

As one of the internal projects we worked on, we decided to go with ReasonML, streams and we also experimented with the registration-free approach.

Travel Companion — Upcoming travel itinerary at your fingertips built for Riviera Tour. Inform about sightseeings and upcoming activities with the app.

Used technologies: React Native, Redux, Redux-Saga, Mapbox and Styled Components.

Image of Riviera Tour project presentation

Superawesome, first job, first hands-on experience with international clients and pushing personal boundaries.

When I joined Superawesome, I was ¼ of the company, which for a design agency means, a plethora of responsibilities. I find myself lucky enough to have been exposed to so many different challenges from the early beginning and for being trusted on delivering my best work at that time. This helped me grow beyond my imagination and it helped me mold further steps in the development of my career. Being one of the best agencies in Serbia, I had an opportunity to work on a wide variety of interesting projects from respected brands across the world.

I served as a Product Designer and Front-end Developer, and I lead direct communication with the stakeholders of various size making sure projects evolve in the right direction.

HLT Corp — Design and development for corporate website and more than 30 landing pages for the makers of the top-rated study applications.

We’ve collaborated with their in-house team who helped us carry through ideations to final results.

SK Gaming — Reorganizing, rebranding and developing a website for a leading eSports organization. More than 20 years of diverse content was reimagined — news, videos, matches, rankings, team and user profiles and social aspects.

Fun fact

Back in 2015, this was the most challenging project I’ve worked on, since I was responsible for most of the project pipeline. At that time, to automatise and simplify the development workflow, I was leveraging the power of the Pug templating language and Grunt task runner.

Years of content

Consistency and attention to details

As one of the most respected eSport clubs in the world, with several million daily impressions, a particular effort was involved in providing consistency and forming the proper brand presence on the web.

Personal work, open-source projects, and long-term collaboration

I enjoy exploring different technologies by creating internal solutions for the projects I work on. I prefer honing long-term relationships on projects for any area of digital business.

When possible, I am contributing to open source community.

Personal project

Hey, Polls! — Create and share polls effortlessly. Making a choice has never been so easy before. Development stack involves: React, Redux, Firebase, Cypress, Jest, Emotion and Docz styleguide.

Check out the web, Android application, or interesting details and thoughts on my blog.

Open Source projects:

Transliterate — VS Code extension which converts latin text to cyrillic and vice versa. Убрзај мапирање

Responsively — Easily adjust JSX components with a responsive, mobile-first approach in mind. Style the way

Lifeboat and Lifeboat Jade — Used on numerous front-end projects with built-in code guide and site pages provided. Keep afloat

Other projects — I created several npm packages and demos using React Native with the primary focus on animation. Most of the work can be found on my GitHub profile.

Iten Engineering — I’ve been working with Iten Engineering for more than 11 years now. Our collaboration has spanned across many areas of their products and marketing efforts. From their corporate website and blog, through branding for digital and print media, to their ventures, including remote desktop access solution and social platform for helping farmers enter the international market.

Pictogram of Iten Engineering on white background

Pictogram of Iten Engineering on dark background