InDebted’s mission is to fix the broken debt collection industry, which has been riddled with malpractices and horror stories. They are looking to protect the most vulnerable of us in society, and they are doing it by leveraging modern technologies and building with a serverless-first mentality.

The challenge

InDebted has a small team of engineers who don’t have much experience with serverless. They recognize the potential with serverless and it aligns well with both their workload and their technical vision. The team needs pragmatic and unbiased advice on where serverless should be best utilized in their architecture. And importantly, they need someone who can pair with them and show them rather than just telling them what to do.

Our journey together

I have worked with Wagner Camarao, Head of Engineering at InDebted, for the past 6 months. Given that InDebted is based in Sydney, all our engagements are done remotely. We spaced out the sessions to fit the team’s needs and took on a variety of topics:

• Consulted on strategic direction the company should take with regards to serverless.
• Assisted in architectural decisions for their new platform.
• Mentored the team on AWS services that are new to them.
• Paired together to implement new features.

Where appropriate, I also created proof-of-concept projects offline to demonstrate key concepts and give the team a base to work from.

The team has made strides towards building the next generation of its platform using a serverless-first approach. They are much more confident in their technical decisions regarding different AWS services and when to use them, such as DynamoDB, Kinesis and Step Functions. They have rebuilt and modernised many of their services and are making heavy use of open source tools such as the Serverless framework and Terraform.