Lokafy - Platform Rebuild and Developer Enablement

At Lokafy (lokafy.com), I joined at a moment when the main product was a Django-based platform that had grown into true spaghetti code — with views implemented in Angular, React and Vue all coexisting in the same project. Because of this complexity and the difficulty of evolving the product, the CEO, Kiran, asked me to redesign and rebuild the platform from scratch.

The rebuild took a bit over a year and covered the full lifecycle: from architecture and design to infrastructure migration and ongoing iteration. Technically, the new stack was:

• Nuxt.js for the frontend, providing a modern, coherent single-page experience.
• Django with Postgres for the backend and data layer, keeping a solid, well-known foundation for business logic and persistence.

Beyond the tech, Lokafy has a strong culture of growing talent from the ground up. One of the core constraints of the project was that the development team would be composed of junior profiles, by design. That meant the challenge was not only to rebuild the platform, but also to train developers with little experience so they could write high-quality code and ramp up quickly.

To support this, I:

• Created development manuals and guidelines, documenting architecture decisions, code conventions and patterns.
• Established the concept of “atomic PRs”: small, self-contained feature branches that made it possible to run deep reviews and give continuous feedback to junior developers.
• Structured the work so features were scoped, controlled and incremental, helping juniors move from 0 to productive in a short time while avoiding risky big-bang changes.

As a result, we consistently saw 4-6 month cycles where developers started as juniors in the team and left ready to take on mid-level roles — and in some cases even senior positions — thanks to the combination of structured guidance, clear architecture and disciplined review practices.

In addition to the application layer, I was also responsible for managing Lokafy's infrastructure. We deployed services on Google App Engine, focusing on:

• Simple, managed scaling, so the team did not have to maintain servers directly.
• Security as a primary concern, configuring the environment to minimize operational risk while supporting the needs of the new platform.

Overall, my role at Lokafy combined platform architecture, hands-on full-stack development (Nuxt.js + Django/Postgres), developer enablement and cloud infrastructure management, turning a fragmented monolith into a more maintainable, scalable and teachable product foundation.