During my summer internship in 2022, I had the privilege to join Circolo, an innovative San Francisco-based startup specializing in the production of smart fitness mirrors. As a frontend developer, my chief responsibility centered on refactoring and deploying the company’s website, which was previously hosted on Shopify with a custom theme. Unfortunately, this version of the website was plagued by performance problems and severe customization restrictions, both of which served as considerable obstacles to further progress.
To address these issues, we opted to transition to a completely overhauled frontend, constructed using React. Our decision to employ this well-regarded framework was driven by its inherent capacity for total control, complemented by a robust ecosystem of libraries, conducive to swift and efficient development. Within a span of less than a month, I managed to successfully rebuild the entire website from scratch, simultaneously ensuring compatibility with the Shopify API. This accomplishment ensured our customers could continue shopping for our products without disruption. Further, I enhanced the PageSpeed score, making the site more responsive, and implemented search engine optimization techniques to improve the website’s visibility on various search engines.
Upon the completion of the website, my focus shifted towards implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and resolving deployment concerns. We chose to utilize Cloudflare workers for hosting the website, in conjunction with Amazon S3 for simplified management of static assets. I prepped the codebase for a production environment, leveraging GitHub Actions for automated deployment in both production and preview deployments. This approach enabled future developers to preview their branches in a production-like setting before merging into the main codebase. As a final task, I assisted my supervisor in launching the new production site with minimal downtime, ensuring minimal disruption to our customers.
Please note that the source code is not publicly accessible, given the commercial nature of the project. The live site can be accessed at circolo.us.