About the Company

Red Shepherd is a financial technology company offering a price optimization platform that finds the lowest credit card processing rates for businesses.

My Story

I joined Red Shepherd as the first and only frontend engineer and UI/UX designer. I was tasked with designing and building a scalable frontend for both the client and admin portals. On the customer facing side, I built a Point of Sale (POS) system using React, that allowed clients to build the inventories and sell goods. On the admin side, I built a comprehensive dashboard that allowed admins to manage the business inventory, and track their credit card processing rates and savings using our proprietary financial processor. I also managed a team of 2 college interns, creating a development roadmap and providing guidance and mentorship.

Red Shepherd was very formative, immersing me in real-world frontend engineering and product design situations. With significant responsibility, I learned to build and design interfaces through an iterative, collaborative, agile process, adapting quickly to evolving requirements.

The POS System & Product Design

The POS system was built using React and my own custom React architecture at the time. It allowed clients to build the inventories and sell goods. It also allowed clients to track their credit card processing rates and savings using our proprietary financial processor. I focused a lot on the UI/UX design of the POS system, as we were competing with companies such as Square and Clover to be the most user-friendly and intuitive POS system on the market. We were able to get the product into some local businesses and get a great feedback loop from users to improve the product.

Retrospective

As this was my first full-time roles out of college, I would do a lot of things differently today. I would implement a more robust frontend state management solution like Redux (Zustand didn't exist yet) to handle the complexity of the POS system and admin dashboard. I would also implement comprehensive frontend testing using Jest and cross-browser testing tools to ensure high code quality and maintainability.