Assisting the FinTech giants in a large greenfield project.
We’ve been proudly working with the World Gold Council since 2021 on their software development and design needs. The World Gold Council is the market development organisation for the gold industry. It works across all parts of the industry, from gold mining to investment, and their aim is to stimulate and sustain demand for gold.
The World Gold Council have a large number of requirements, most importantly, a large scale-greenfield project to see its current set of internal tools re-written using modern practices that we are all too familiar with.
the problem
Internal and external web apps with long loading times, large bundle sizes and a disjointed and archaic architectural foundation.
the solution
A well-organised, well-written, design-system-driven, component-based solution that follows the industry best practices.
Well Organised
We inherited a team of 3 other developers before starting on the greenfield project.
The first port of call for us was to see the monolithic code base split into more manageable chunks. We went one by one and moved each product within WGC into its own repository, allowing developers to focus purely on the product that matters and not to get lost in the larger code-base.
We added a series of documentation detailing how our code should look and where certain files belong. We knew that by laying down a strong foundation, the other developers on the team would quickly apply these rules to their own work.
Well Written
Having each product thus in its own repository, we wanted to make sure that any changes to any product followed our standards. To achieve this we created a series of quality assurances, from code linting and GitLab CI/CD pipelines that ran tests on our code to vigorous pull requests.
This also helped the other team members understand what we are trying to achieve, and gave a rulebook that they could all follow.
Design System Driven
Using Figma to document your company's design system allows for all parties within the company to have a single location to draw inspiration and understand your brand better.
Companies with a clear and consistent brand give the end-user a stronger feeling of professionalism and trust and we ensured that we set up a company-wide design system using Figma.
We saw this transcend WGC products and even feature for company-wide presentations.
Component-Based Approach
Naturally following the design system we set to work building the component library.
We created a shared component library that all WGC products inherited and we leveraged Storybook, enabling us to share it with the designers to further brand and product cohesion.
The shared component library allowed us to create consistent-looking products in half the time, having all the core vitals of a website readily available. This allowed our team to focus on the business logic of the product itself and the problem we were trying to solve.
The Final Product
We oversaw and assisted in building over 8 separate products moving all to a modern TypeScript-based solution using React, Redux, SCSS and Ant Design. We introduced CI/CD pipeline that allowed for one-click deploys, instant rollbacks, versioning and much more.
All products were performant and followed the best practices of the industry. We are very proud with what we achieved, the team we built, and we are looking forward to working with the World Gold Council again in the future.
