alan oakden avatar

My time at Interactive Investor

At the end of 2023 a recruiter reached out to me to ask about my availability for a Drupal and React contract.

It was a pleasant surprise as the market had seemed quiet until that point and I'd rarely had my Drupal expertise as the main pull for clients.

Nevertheless, what started as a 3 month contract soon became 16 months.

About Interactive Investor

Interactive Investor Services Limited, trading as interactive investor, is a subscription-based online investment service in the United Kingdom, founded in 1995 by the entrepreneur Sherry Coutu. It provides financial information, as well as investment tools. It is the UK's biggest flat-fee investment platform, with (as of 2022) £59 billion of assets under administration and over 400,000 customers. The company is based in Manchester, with offices in London and Leeds. Since 2022 it has been a subsidiary of UK-based investment company aberdeen.

Screenshots

ii mobile screenshot oneii mobile screenshot two
ii mobile screenshot threeii mobile screenshot four

Tech Stack

Without giving too much away, ii utilise a series of private npm repositories that separate logic and ui into maintainable chunks to be consumed across:

  • Private (Secure) web app
  • Public web app
  • A series of microapps such as those used for the header or for navigating /help path pages
  • Helper services used by both the mobile app and web

There's various AWS configurations and services in use, often controlled through 'infrastructure as code', apps build through Github CI/CD actions before separately working their way through AWS pipelines.

Separately, AWS lambda functions are used to generate sitemaps, menu items and other shared context items.

Further to this, the public website content is built from a headless Drupal instance and parsed through normalizers onto a static gateway API that's later consumed by the NextJS front end.

Projects completed

In my time I:

  • Set up a shortcodes feature consisting of:
    • A custom Drupal module to enable CMS editors to enter key-value pairs into a dynamoDB table
    • A nextJS API route to collate live pricing data as well as the CMS editor entered key-value pairs
    • A helper function to parse the shortcodes and render them in the frontend based on a CMS user entering a shortcode similar to [ii-shortcode key="some-key"] in a WYSIWYG field with the value being fetched from dynamo DB.
  • Converted figma designs into a full suite of new React tsx components that would in turn be selected and built out on a per page basis, based on editor choices in the CMS.
  • Lightly altered existing 'old' content types and their front end rendering in order to blend their style with the new components.
  • Integrated Salesforce Marketing Cloud to enable CMS site editors to highlight components in the CMS and in turn dynamically replace them on the front end based on tracked user data.

Closing thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at ii, working with a close team of developers that became a permanent fixture under the name of 'public website squad'. It engrained my love for React and Typescript, while also becoming more confident with SSR and other nextJS specialities.