S – Situation
Organization needed to continue developing its internal time‑tracking system, and expand the development team for summer 2021. Four frontend‑oriented summer interns joined, and I was appointed as Lead Developer and Agile Master to technically lead full‑stack development and mentor the new team members.
T – Task
- Mentoring & team support: Serve as a one‑to‑one mentor for the summer interns and as the team’s Lead Developer, ensuring the backlog was maintained and that everyone had meaningful tasks.
- Feature development: Implement a Stripe payment integration to support a SaaS offering of the product; complete accounting system integrations (Procountor, Netvisor, Talenom); develop customer‑specific feature toggles.
- Processes & QA: Introduce a Kanban workflow; create unit tests and end‑to‑end tests and run them in the CI/CD pipeline; review UI design plans with the team before implementation.
A – Actions
Mentoring & team support
- Held weekly group mentoring sessions and ad‑hoc one‑on‑one meetings as needed, answering questions and providing guidance throughout each day.
- Managed the backlog and delegated tasks to the interns in a way that balanced learning opportunities with delivering tangible results.
User‑centric design & workshops
- Led weekly design review workshops with the team and Product Owner where we defined the user experience for new features.
Technical implementation & integrations
- Mentored the interns through implementing the Stripe payment integration in the Kotlin/Spring Boot backend and React frontend, as well as setting up the feature‑toggle mechanism.
- Taught advanced Git usage and branch management strategies.
- Trained the team in using ORM solutions and the Liquibase database‑migration tool.
R – Results
- Feature delivery & business impact: The team released several key features over the summer, including the Stripe integration, which enabled commercialization of the tool as a SaaS product and brought in new paying customers. The feature‑toggle mechanism reduced customer‑specific deployment costs and sped up the release cycle.
- Impact of mentoring: All interns secured employment: one was hired full‑time and the other three found career opportunities on their own, demonstrating the effectiveness of the mentoring approach.
Tools & Technologies
- Languages & Frameworks: Kotlin, Spring Boot, TypeScript, React
- APIs & Integration: REST, Stripe API, feature toggles, AWS Lambda
- Databases & Infrastructure: AWS RDS, Liquibase, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, AWS CDK
- Testing & QA: Jest, Cypress, JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers
- DevOps & CI/CD: Docker, GitLab CI/CD
- Version Control & Collaboration: GitLab, Figma, Reetro