How a dedicated Kotlin team can improve ecommerce integration

The acquisition of several ecommerce companies required TB Auctions to integrate all systems into a single platform, while also adding new features to improve the user experience.

Customer

Name: TB Auctions
Line of business: Ecommerce
Founding year: 2018
Size: Up to 500 employees in the company’s workforce.
Country: The Netherlands.

Challenge

As a result of acquiring several ecommerce companies, TB Auctions needed to integrate all systems into a unified platform, while also incorporating new functionalities to enhance the overall user experience.

Solution

To produce high-quality code and satisfy the customer’s requirements, we put together a team of Kotlin experts who were solely focused on working on this project.

Creating a unified ecommerce platform: technology stack

Kotlin,
Ktor,
JetBrains/Exposed,
Azure Service Bus,
MS SQL,
Redis,
MongoDB,
Grafana,
Loki.

Simplifying ecommerce with TB Auctions.

The client started replacing their systems with Kotlin some time ago, and as they grew, they realized they needed more experienced Kotlin experts. After they bought several ecommerce businesses and made the decision to combine all of their systems into one platform, this became especially urgent. Additionally, TB Auctions focused on creating new features that would simplify the purchasing process for users.

The referral and successful small project

The client contacted us through a referral from our trusted partner – Angry Nerds. At the outset, TB Auctions chose to assign us a smaller project in order to assess and confirm our technical expertise.

From one Senior Fullstack Developer to a complete team

We’ve started with one person (Senior Fullstack Developer) working on the project on our side, whose remarkable technical skills were highly appreciated by the customer. That’s why the client requested adding 25 extra individuals, comprising mostly regular, mid and senior Kotlin specialists, a team of juniors and frontend experts (Angular and REACT), as well as DevOps, .NET and QA automation specialists. Our team worked as part of the customer’s larger team.

Optimizing efficiency with multiple teams

To ensure optimal efficiency, we formed multiple teams, each with a maximum of six members as the bigger groups made cooperation challenging. Our team shared innovative ideas with the customer and recommended strategic modifications to optimize their operations.

And yeah, really professional. So that’s what you need, of course. Cause it’s a big investment, but it’s also a big trust you give to another company. So yeah, that was key for me. I need to have a trusting relationship, the same one I have with my people.

CTO of TB Auctions

Which technologies and expertise have we applied?

The system is built on Microservices architecture.
K8s manages containerized deployments and scaling applications stored on the Azure Cloud platform. It is an event-based application using Azure Service Bus as a message broker.
Kotlin is the primary back-end language, with Kotest as a testing module. Kotlin programming language has numerous benefits and advantages. It can reduce the boilerplate code required to perform tasks, resulting in less clutter in backend solutions. Faster execution of the written code and quicker loading times are produced by less code and a shorter compile time. In order to make the code shorter and less verbose, it also eliminates unnecessary vocabulary. Kotlin provides several features that enhance code safety, such as null safety and type inference. These features help minimize the risk of runtime errors and simplify the process of writing error-free code.

Kotlin stands apart as a distinct language with notable advantages, particularly in the realm of functional programming. When we started using Kotlin with functional programming techniques, our team got really excited about it! It made it easier to bring in new people who were genuinely interested in what we were doing.

CTO of TB Auctions

Ktor is used to support Kotlin with building asynchronous Servers and Clients.
JetBrains Exposed framework connect Kotlin with SQL and provides DSL features to work with it. MS SQL is the leading SQL Engine for most of the services databases.
Redis is used as a fast cache database. MongoDB provides more complicated aggregation and analytics of data.
The whole system is monitored and observed by Grafana for display data, Prometheus for scrapping metrics data, and Loki for log aggregations.

Achieving results through comprehensive ecommerce integration efforts.

The team put forth a lot of effort to make sure that every system was fully integrated and operating without a hitch, ensuring that users would have a simple and hassle-free experience when browsing and making purchases. Due to the changes, customers were able to purchase products from a single source, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple sites.

Millions of products

are auctioned by TB Auctions every year, providing a valuable service to customers around the world.

50%

of the client’s technology department was made up of our IT team.

Within 12 days

from the initial conversation with the customer, the project had begun.

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