Ten years of legacy,
cleanly rebuilt.
Three years at Tikamoon, helping migrate a decade-old homemade PHP framework onto Sylius and Symfony 6. Full-stack work across the new codebase: frontend rebuilds, backend features, daily production deploys, and the Kubernetes / GCP plumbing underneath.
- Client
- Tikamoon · French e-commerce
- Years
- 2020–2023
- Role
- Full-stack developer (employed)
- Scope
- Frontend, backend, DevOps
- Status
- ● Shipped, in production
Tikamoon is a French furniture e-commerce business that had grown for a decade on top of a homemade PHP framework. Every new feature carried the weight of every decision that had come before. The team needed an industry-standard stack to move faster, hire more easily, and stop firefighting.
The answer was to rebuild on Sylius and Symfony 6, migrating incrementally so the business kept selling while the platform got replaced underneath it. I joined as a full-stack developer for the duration of that rebuild and the period that followed.
“Rebuilding the plane in flight, while the passengers kept ordering furniture.”
I was a regular contributor across the whole codebase rather than the technical lead. The most fun work was the frontend rebuilds, where I owned specific pages end-to-end. The most important work was the cumulative effect of three years of daily deploys, careful refactors, and small fixes that compound.
Frontend rebuilds
Owned the redesign and reimplementation of key pages, including the full product page. Twig templates, modern JavaScript, design-system-aware components.
Backend features
Day-to-day work in the Symfony 6 codebase: catalogue, checkout, back-office, integrations. Bug fixing and refactoring alongside new feature work.
Daily production deploys
Shipped to production every working day. Built and maintained the muscle of small, safe, reversible changes instead of risky weekly releases.
DevOps on Kubernetes + GCP
Helped maintain and tune the production cluster on GCP. Pipelines, observability, the unglamorous infrastructure work that makes the rest of it possible.
