Founding Engineer

Released is a platform that provides tools for customer communication, primarily via AI-generated changelogs based on Jira issues, public roadmaps and capturing and processing user feedback. We launched in early 2022 and are growing fast.

The stack

• Front end: React, TypeScript, React Query, Tailwind CSS
• Back end: Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, AWS, Cloudflare
• DevOps: Docker, GitHub Actions, AWS, Cloudflare
• Embeds: Preact, Web Components, TypeScript, SWR, Tailwind CSS

My role

In my role as Founding Engineer at Released, I mostly focus on design and front end. Given we’re using a Node.js backend, I also write a fair amount of backend code, but my main focus is on the front end.

Notable work

• Embeds - I built a system for generating embeds for our users to embed their changelogs and roadmaps on their own websites. This involved building a Preact app that fetches the data required to render the embeds from our API, and then renders the embeds on the user’s website. This was a fun project that involved a lot of interesting challenges, such as ensuring the embeds are responsive and look good on any website, and ensuring the embeds are fast to load. The embeds also used custom elements and thee shadow DOM for style encapsulation.
• API performance improvements - previously our embed requests would take ~800ms to load the JSON required to render the embed. I managed to get this down to ~25ms by using CloudFront’s support for the stale-while-revalidate cache header. This means we can serve stale data while revalidating the cache in the background, which is perfect for our use case, given it’s not critical that the data is up to date for the first request after an update.