A platform for facilitating lending, renting, and sales of hiking equipment.

The project was for the summer internship with Capra Consulting. Our team of 7 developers began the development of a platform for the purchase, rental, and lending of hiking equipment. The project started from scratch and within 7 full weeks we developed core functionality for the frontend, backend, and infrastructure. The project was, after the completed internship, taken over by full-time employees and is still under development.

In my position as Scrum Master I was fortunate to be able to join the project planning relatively early on, before any development had begun. I was involved in writing user stories together with the product owner, sketching out the roadmap of features and thinking about the entire service as a whole. As development begun, a lot of what we'd planned was reiterated upon, and soon we had rewritten/respecified almost all user stories. I believe this serves as a great example of agile development.

The process leading up to development and the initial weeks of development was very educational. Although I had a good theoretical background in agile development, I gained a much broader understanding of the practical implementation of it.

The development pace increased steadily throughout the summer. Being surrounded by great developers in my team, we managed to produce considerable value throughout the entire stack. I especially enjoyed working on the backend as we got to use http4k, a toolkit for Kotlin which I'd never worked with before. Being powered by Functional Programming techniques, it proved to be more transparent and tangible than other frameworks I'd priorly used for Java/Kotlin development.

It was also interesting to get an overview of how the infrastructure was handled. All the infrastructure was provided by AWS as IaC (Infrastructure as Code). We used AWS CDK to create all the stacks for the service to employ. Being the first time I'd worked closely with AWS, it inspired me to look further into it. I proceeded to study and claim my Associate certificate as an AWS Solutions Architect.

All things considered, the project was a both interesting and educational, and the internship provided tremendous value. Working on a service that will go live to serve a massive user base is a different experience from developing something only for yourself. I'm excited to see what it will become.

Check out the project's progress here