In my second year at TELECOM Nancy, I had to find an internship as a software developer. Thanks to my work on the orientation social platform, I convince a team of 3 young engineers who build inProgress : their web development startup, to hire me for a 10 week period. Besides, I’ve although negotiated the fact that I’ll be on an entire project with client relationship. Those two aspects were really important to me. So I was in charge of the conception of the new version of Assipe’s SaaS platform : a startup based in Nancy that aims to help companies to create their legal documents about health and safety at work.
The main difficulty that I encounter in this job was to deal with new technologies. Although I love discovering new ways of building applications, and more recently javascript applications, learning new skills as fast as possible and quickly applying them was a real challenge for the inProgress team & for me. Before talking about those tools that I used, I want to tell you why I had to used them. Until now, inProgress build their projects with a home-made Angular framework. But it quickly shows some issues with maintainability especially when they were asked to add some features to their existing app. They recently decided to use the Facebook React library that helps them to easily develop their iOS & Android mobile applications with React Native. So they wanted to develop all their future web projects with React only. Meteor is the full stack framework they choose in addition to React thanks to its large community and its principles. Precisely, they decided to follow the Mantra specification that offers an application architecture for Meteor in order to obtain a good maintainability and modularity. It was this specification I have to follow during all my internship.
A Mantra project use React for the view (with the new ES6 standards), Meteor as a framework and MongoDB for the database. It use the Airbnb Enzyme testing utilities. In addition, we added the Astronomy model layer for our data schemes. Even if I was comfortable with javascript and jQuery, those new tools and the new syntax were like if I had to build this application with a language I didn’t know. For example, the logging system took me 2 weeks to build instead of 1 previously planned. But after several weeks, I finally get used to the tools and was able to develop easily reaching a feature a day.
As I said it before, Assipe is a startup founded in 2014 by Léo Thomas. It offers 2 services : a customer service and a web platform. For a ~40€ / month, a company could edit its Unique Document : a mandatory summary of all actions and preventions set to prevent human risks asked by the government. On the platform, the company could also manage its jobs and employees. After 2 years, Léo found the business model ineffective and decided to change it.
So I had to build a whole new platform with a bunch of new features. The main difference was the emergence of distributors who could offers to company security equipments and trainings. In summary, companies needs are sold to distributors. With this new business model, Assipe can offer its service for free to companies in exchange of selling their datas to distributors and has now more client because companies can spend less time and less money on this Unique Document.
From a personal point of view, I was glad to be part of a project linking two young companies. I was happy to discover the startup world and it helps me to find out what I really enjoy at work : taking care of projects that I cherish a lot.
