Contributions & Challenges

As a Front-end Engineer (Independent Contractor) at Commslayer, I made the following contributions from April 2024 to January 2025.

Features

Add/Edit Shopify Tags & Notes

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 to connect their custom email domains to Commslayer. The feature also provides step-by-step guidance for adding DNS records and configuring email forwarding.

AI Response Draft

This feature automatically generates an AI-powered draft reply for every ticket based on Shopify data and past conversations.

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. 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 many intent items on the page, I added live search, sorting by name and last modified date, and pagination to help agents find intents more efficiently.

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, allowing them to create a more comfortable editing experience.

Additional Contributions

Candidate Technical Reviews & Onboarding

Aside from my main tasks as a front-end engineer, I also helped review technical assessments for an engineering candidate. After the candidate joined, I assisted with the onboarding process by reviewing merge requests (MRs) and discussing the features they were working on. I did this to support the team and help ensure the project ran smoothly.

Challenges

Large codebase

It took me a few months to understand the large codebase. I started with smaller tasks and gradually took on more complex work as I became familiar with the codebase.

Here are some of the approaches I used when working on more complex tasks:

Manual testing

Every change had to be tested to make sure it didn't introduce regressions in 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 every page that used the editor, along with its related features.

New components & feature flags

When working on complex features, I often introduced new components behind feature flags to avoid disrupting existing functionality. Once the rollout was complete and stable, I removed the feature flags to keep the codebase clean.

Notes: