Indie

Indie project revisited the concept of the External Portal, but with a new proposal: to end the contract with ServiceNow. The company was facing unsustainable licensing costs for the platform. Unlike the previous project, where we developed a React.js interface that communicated with ServiceNow’s API, the new solution was to create a complete application, fully independent of ERPs.

Building the MVP

The first step was to create an MVP. The main goals were to:

• Recreate the core workflows from the old platform.
• Develop a REST API.
• Migrate the ServiceNow database to our own.
• Build a new interface.

This MVP stage was carried out with limited resources, in parallel with ongoing feature development in ServiceNow.

With limited capacity on the project, I was responsible for initiating the front-end development. My first task was to get the application up and running. For this, we used AWS Amplify, which offered predefined configurations for deployment and CI/CD. We chose a traditional SPA setup using React + Vite.

When defining the stack, we opted for ANT Design as our UI library due to its practicality: we didn’t have a dedicated design or UX/UI team, and we needed a consistent visual interface quickly. I also proposed a Git Flow versioning strategy tailored to our workflow.

A Fullstack Solution

The success of the project led to a valuable partnership with Apex Group and prompted strategic changes in our platform’s architecture. At that point, we decided it was time to address technical debt and prepare the application for greater scalability. I proposed restructuring the front-end stack to overcome the key bottlenecks we encountered during the MVP, while maintaining our foundation in React and similar libraries. The proposed changes included:

• Next.js: Fullstack framework for server-side rendering, improved performance, SEO, and API encapsulation.
• Tailwind CSS: a utility-first framework that enabled rapid development and easy interface customization.
• Primitives: accessible, lightweight, and fully customizable components, installed directly in the project, avoiding the performance issues and limitations of ANT Design.
• Prisma: to replace Sequelize, which had limitations when building complex filters and queries.
• Zod: for secure data validation with full TypeScript integration.

Apex Partnership

With the partnership with Apex Group, we entered a new stage of technical evolution and platform maturity. In addition to significantly reducing costs, we gained speed, control, and the freedom to evolve the platform according to our needs.

Apex and Jive form a partnership and launch a platform for alternative assets.