/Philz_Coffee

When beloved West Coast coffee brand Philz Coffee wanted a partner to help them design and develop their “order ahead” mobile apps, Work & Co was the chosen company to get the project and I was lucky enough to be one of the developers involved, leading development of the client apps.

What started as a simple MVP candidate turned into a nearly one year commitment, with a lot of research and polishing involved in creating a beautiful, yet performant application that manages to awe and never compromise. To keep the application consistent across Android and iOS, and guarantee near-immediate release on both platforms, we ended up basing the whole application in React Native, a somewhat new platform for us.

While I had React and some React Native experience, this was also a project of many firsts for me. For one thing, it was the first time I had to focus on actual native iOS development (using Objective-C), since we had many components that required a native counterpart to be built or linked.

It was also the first project where I seriously dived into GraphQL, as it was our chosen API architecture. We first created an initial GraphQL schema based on our design's business requirements, as well a mock server as a proof of concept, and then handed off the responsibilities of creating the production server to a third-party chosen by the client (Lohika). This worked very well to ensure that the platform met our expectations.

On a less technical note, with a size varying between 2-5 developers at different times, it was also the biggest frontend team I've led and helped manage until to that date. This team ended up setting the foundation for Philz' own new engineering department, as we helped recruit and train new engineers that took over the project from Work & Co's hands.

And finally, this was also my first project to ever be featured during a WWDC keynote, when Apple used Philz as an example of how a new iOS feature (Siri shortcuts) would work. I wasn't directly involved with any of the material used in the presentation, but it still was a proud moment to see an application you helped develop in front of so many eyeballs.