Styla

After working for tape.tv I decided to stay in the glooming Berlin Startup world and joined a small company which would later be called Styla - settings sails to conquer the online magazine and content commerce market on an international scope as a SaaS.

I became part of 10-man-sized team (including founders) sitting in a shared office, drinking Club Mate. The startup vibe was real and I felt very much at home. I quickly found my role in the 5-man-sized development team as a Frontend Developer. Since the main application was also written in Backbone.js I began implementing new features and core improvements soon after.

Since being a SaaS there is always work for specific clients involved. I ended up building entire websites from scratch for clients like Ludwigbeck, Boohoo and PKZ. All of them are built with OctoberCMS, a very flexible CMS based on PHP, and hosted via AWS. Additionally for Ludwigbeck I was also responsible for the entire UI/UX design and integration of their existing Brand and Events APIs.

We greatly improved our infrastructure by splitting our service up in multiple micro services, mostly running on Node.js and React.js. My job was to develop, improve and maintain some of those services as a full-stack developer, improve our technical SEO capabilities and help clients implement our software. As everyone in the company I was involved in developing a completely new layout engine for our magazines, using a machine learning approach.

I left Styla in mid 2017 looking for a new, green-field challenge over at perspective.co.