Joining midway
I joined the development team on a project that already had a history. Successive turnover had left the codebase messy: different developers, different styles, different plugins of varying quality, all stitched together. My job was to add speed to a build that had accumulated serious delays, while a high-profile client expected a level of service to match their standing.
A lot of modules
The scope of the site was large. I worked across many modules, all built as extensions of Joomla plugins: facility booking, event calendar and registration, a wine shop, a form and survey builder, and a newsletter composition and sending system. Both front office and back office, both frontend and backend.
Performance and the design fix
At one point, we hit resource usage spikes that were hard to trace. The technical investigation to find bottlenecks was going to take time. But someone found a smarter fix: by changing how information was presented on the page, we changed how members used the site, and the spikes disappeared. It was a good lesson: sometimes a design solution is faster and more effective than a technical one.
Infrastructure
I worked on setting up the staging and production servers for this multi-tier application: AWS EC2, Nginx, MySQL. I also handled vulnerability tracking and fixing, and general performance improvements across the platform.
