Contributions & Challenges
As a Front-end Engineer(Independent Contractor), at Commslayer.
I made the following contributions from April 2024 to January 2025.
Please note that not all of my contributions are listed here.
Features
Add / edit Shopify tags & note
A feature to add and edit Shopify order tags & notes directly on the Commslayer web app, so agents don't have to open the Shopify dashboard to do it.
DNS Onboarding
This feature allows agents with a custom domain email to connect it with Commslayer. To make it easier, there's a guide to adding DNS records and setting up email forwarding through Commslayer.
AI response draft
The goal of this feature is to add a ready-to-use draft message generated by AI, to every ticket based on Shopify data and past conversations.Click here to learn more about this feature.
Social media auto moderation
The Social Media Auto Moderation feature helps keep your comment section clean by automatically removing negative comments, spam, or profanity. Agents can also directly like/unlike and hide/unhide comments through the provided buttons.Click here to learn more about this feature.
Merge tickets
This feature combines tickets about the same issue or from the same customer, so agents don't have to deal with duplicates and can keep everything more organized.
UI/UX Improvements
Redesign sidebar
The sidebar got a redesign to make it simpler and more modern. The challenge I faced was learning the behavior and components of the old sidebar since the new one needed to use existing features while adding new ones.
AI intents page
Since there are lot of intent items on the intent page, and to make it easier for agents to find the intent they need, I was tasked with adding a live search feature, sorting by name and date modified, also adding pagination.
Initiative
Resizable text editor
Some agents frequently mentioned that the text editor felt too short, and even after I made it longer, it still wasn't enough. So, I took the initiative to make the text editor resizable. With this feature, agents can adjust the size to whatever they need, letting them create their best experience.
Additional contribution
Review test from new candidate & onboarding proccess
Aside from my main tasks as a front-end engineer, I also helped with reviewing tests for potential new engineers. When the candidate joined, I also assisted in the onboarding process, such as reviewing the MRs submitted and discussing the features being worked on. I did this to support the team and make sure the project ran smoothly.
Challenges
Large codebase
It took me a few months to understand the large codebase. I was given tasks by them, starting with simple tasks and gradually moving to more complex ones.
Here's what I often did to work on complex tasks:
Manual testing
Every change had to be tested to make sure it didn't affect other features. I did manual end-to-end testing and took videos or screenshots as evidence for each scenario. For example, when I updated the text editor, I manually tested all pages using it, along with some of the features inside it.
New components & feature flags
When building a new feature and dealing with complicated components, I usually avoid disrupting existing ones by building new components and using feature flags. Once the feature was fully rolled out and stable, I removed the feature flags to maintain a clean codebase.