HelloFresh / Green Chef
A big hill to climb...
I joined the HelloFresh team in 2018, just after the acquisition of Green Chef. Green Chef is an Organic focused meal kit delivery service, and was the first to offer a Keto meal plan.
Initially hired as a Staff Engineer, my primary responsibility was to stabilize the Green Chef platform. The technology inherited was a NodeJS monolithic API that handled various tasks such as order processing, user and subscription management, product forecasting, and fulfillment planning. The platform was in a state of disrepair, requiring manual intervention, particularly in the areas of order processing and shipment fulfillment. The API was complemented by an Angular 1.x front-end application, which suffered from elusive bugs and lacked observability at that time. This is not uncommon in a startup environment and something I could have been guilty of myself in the past had I not stayed around long enough to see my past products mature. It is important to view these challenges as opportunities to learn and grow and approach them with an understanding that there is always a reason for the way things are the way they are.
Fighting the scariest dragon first...
The first aspect tackled was the order processing system. The existing codebase was convoluted, with business logic scattered across multiple files. To address this, I created a process map to gain a clearer understanding of the order flow. Next, I embarked on refactoring the code to enhance readability and eliminate the common errors and need for manual intervention. I implemented logging and monitoring mechanisms to enhance observability. In the end, this endeavor proved successful, as the process soon operated smoothly and I was confident my focus could shift to the next challenge. During this refactor, I introduced a new worker process utilizing BullMQ. The integration of a comprehensive job queue greatly improved our ability to manage order processing and fulfillment and in the future would prove to be a valuable tool in our team's toolkit.
Pull the weed in front of you...
During my early days with the Green Chef team, we encountered numerous challenges while operating with a small team. Prioritizing tasks was often a complex decision. My strategy involved prioritizing issues that directly impacted customers or caused significant difficulties for the team. This led us to focus on improving test coverage and enhancing monitoring and observability. Implementing these improvements instilled confidence within the team, enabling us to make changes to the platform and introduce new features more comfortably. Additionally, we initiated efforts to tackle the technical debt that had accumulated over time. This involved removing outdated code and replacing it with newer, more maintainable alternatives.
A roadmap and a full tank of gas...
The team at our Boulder office experienced rapid growth, expanding from 10 to 20 and then to 30 engineers, QA engineers, and product managers. This growth enabled us to stabilize the platform and embark on adding new features and functionalities. Subsequently, I was promoted to Director of Engineering, overseeing teams in DevOps, Platform, SRE, Core API, and Internal Applications. Over the following year, we undertook numerous exciting projects. We established a standardized set of platform tools to facilitate the development and deployment of services extracted from the monolithic architecture. We implemented a new fulfillment and shipping system using a strategy pattern to accommodate multiple shipping label providers. We replaced the outdated Angular 1.x front-end with a modern React front-end powered by Next.js, significantly enhancing performance and compliance compared to other HF brand applications. We developed new forecasting models, implemented features to offer our users greater flexibility in product selection and quantity, and streamlined the signup process. These changes improved our AOV and increased our active user base by 5x.
A global perspective...
In the last year of my time at HelloFresh I was able to focus on more global architecture problems. Partnering with engineers from NYC, Berlin, Tornto, and Sydney, we sought solutions that could be applied accross all company brands. I worked on a global authentication and user management solution, brought the learnings from the Green Chef shipping and fulfillment platform to other teams, and found ways to unify the menu management service to support a white-label mobile and front-end application being developed by our Canada team. I left HelloFresh in 2021. I had accomplished what I had set out to do and was ready for a new challenge. I am proud of the work that I did and the team that I built. I'm even more proud to see the team I mentored go on to do great things of their own design and make impacts at HelloFresh and other companies around the world.