LEGO Ideas
When I worked on LEGO Ideas, a large crowdsourcing platform with over 3 million users, our mission was to rethink the website from the ground up, in order to deliver a smoother experience to a wide set of user groups. Though strategies shifted over time and work is still ongoing, you can for example see some of that work on the Challenges page.
I was lucky enough to work in virtually every part of the codebase. The stack was TypeScript-based, with Next.js as the frontend and BFF, and Node.js with Nest.js on the backend. The synchronous API was a federated GraphQL layer talking to a handful of microservices, while the asynchronous API used Apache Pulsar for events. For the database, we used PostgreSQL and TypeORM. We also had quite a comprehensive test suite with Jest for unit tests and Cypress for end-to-end tests.
Joining LEGO and working on this project was a great learning experience in many regards. Being part of a large team (~20 people) and working with much more senior developers was a new experience for me at the time. The level of scalability and, crucially for the new platform, flexibility, brought with it a host of interesting challenges, which I am happy to have learned a lot from.