Back in early 2016, the good people at Thread were looking for a freelance frontend developer to help them while a new in-house developer was being recruited. So I came in and joined the most welcoming and well-organised team I ever worked with.

Maybe because the founders are Y Combinator alumni (or they’re just a group of really smart people), workdays felt very efficient as part of a well-oiled machine, to the point that I coded and pushed live into production a small feature on the very first day.

Weeks at Thread usually revolved around challenges and an overarching goal. Having worked with them for a few months, I ended up being involved in multiple customer-facing features of the website and some admin tools as well.

Some of the challenges I worked on, helped to improve the user experience with the signup process, shopping cart and the ideas feed. Some made the stylists’ daily tasks more enjoyable and easy to perform. Others introduced entirely new features like the Tips blog.

Technical

The frontend used Django templates with vanilla javascript wrapped in jQuery for browser compatibility. For styling Sass was used. Most features involved some degree of A/B testing for optimal results. To improve the site speed I also helped optimise the critical rendering path for primary user actions by reducing dependencies on scripts and styles.