Product Engineering/2023 — 2024
Cosmetic Reports
Legacy C# reporting tool rebuilt as a standalone full-stack app
- Role
- Full-Stack Lead
- Year
- 2023 — 2024
- Discipline
- Product Engineering
- Stack
- 9 technologies
A replacement for a legacy C# reporting application that ran inside an iframe in Salesforce Commerce, suffering long load times and an unresponsive plain HTML interface.
01The problem
The existing reporting tool was a legacy C# application embedded as an iframe inside the Salesforce Commerce platform. Load times were long, and the interface was plain HTML and CSS with no responsive behaviour — so it was slow on desktop and effectively unusable on anything smaller.
02The approach
Rather than optimise inside the iframe, we proposed a standalone full-stack application that is not embedded at all. Next.js 14 and TypeScript with ShadCN UI and Tailwind on the front end, a NestJS service talking to MSSQL over ODBC on the back, both containerised with Docker and hosted on AWS EC2.
03The outcome
Delivered as a faster standalone application with a responsive interface. Directing a team of three on this class of legacy reporting modernisation produced a 30% performance improvement and a substantial UI/UX uplift for the client.
04Decisions worth noting
- 01
Chose to leave the iframe entirely rather than optimise within a constraint that caused the problem.
- 02
NestJS to MSSQL over ODBC, so the existing reporting database stayed authoritative and untouched.
- 03
Responsive interface from the start — the original had none.
- 04
Dockerised both tiers for predictable deployment to EC2.