Case Study
TotallyMoney’s mission is to improve the UK’s credit score and cement its position as one of the most customer-focused FinTech brands nationwide.
The company combines industry-leading technology with financial knowledge to help customers make sense of their credit scores. Placing them firmly on the side of the consumer in a market that is often confusing and unfair.
The challenge
TotallyMoney sees serverless technologies as the future of software development and the perfect vehicle with which to modernise its technology stack and fuel its drive for faster innovation. However, the team lacks the necessary experience to navigate its journey to this new paradigm safely. There are simply too many unknowns and risks along the way.
The company needed an experienced hand to guide them and upskill their engineers.
Our journey together
Over the course of 3 months, I worked with several teams within TotallyMoney:
- Reviewed existing architectural decisions to highlight potential failure modes and areas for improvement.
- Reviewed the company’s AWS setup and CI process with the InfoSec team.
- Assisted in architectural decisions for new projects and challenged the teams to think about scalability, resilience, security and cost.
- Worked with the platform team to standardise logging and create a shared log aggregation platform.
- Mentored teams on AWS services that are new to them.
- Mentored teams on best practices with the Serverless framework.
- Paired with teams to refactor or rewrite legacy systems to serverless, while reducing complexity and operational cost. Upskilling the teams on the relevant AWS services in the process.
The teams now feel much more comfortable with serverless technologies within AWS such as API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB. They have a clearer picture of the landscape and the pros and cons of different approaches. They have discovered new architectural patterns and have made strides towards refactoring their existing services to serverless. Some of the projects we worked on together are running in production already.
“Yan always puts the business needs first, delivering lean & flexible solutions at great speed. He is an enthusiastic and motivated mentor, architect, and pairing partner, exhibiting thoughtfulness and patience when explaining a subject. Fundamentally, Yan has improved our team by increasing our ability to derive value from AWS and Lambda in particular.”
Nick Blair, tech lead, TotallyMoney
Yan always puts the business needs first, delivering lean & flexible solutions at great speed. He is an enthusiastic and motivated mentor, architect, and pairing partner, exhibiting thoughtfulness and patience when explaining a subject. Fundamentally, Yan has improved our team by increasing our ability to derive value from AWS and Lambda in particular.
Nick Blair
Tech Lead at TotallyMoney
Want to level up your team?
If your team needs consistent, regular advice and guidance as they take their first steps into serverless. I offer a monthly retainer service that allows unlimited access to me for calls, emails, asynchronous reviews, or quick chats.
