Octopaye, a payroll product.
Make It Simple is a software house. Since I joined, our team has worked on Octopaye, a payroll SaaS product, adding new features and rebuilding and enhancing the old ones. Four threads run through my work there.
- Role
- Software Engineer — Backend / Full Stack
- Where
- Make It Simple · UK, remote
- Stack
- Node.js · Express · MongoDB · Mongoose · Angular · AWS
- Product
- Octopaye — payroll SaaS
The four threads
- A50+
RESTful APIs
Designed, developed and maintained with Node.js, Express, MongoDB and Mongoose for the platform’s core workflows.
- B
Responsiveness
Stopped exports, reports and list screens from crashing by changing how they read from MongoDB.
- C
Legacy modernization
Refactored legacy APIs and modules for performance, maintainability and reuse — compatible with existing production workflows.
- D
End-to-end delivery
Features carried across backend services and Angular applications, with QA and other engineering teams.
When the data got too heavy.
The problem
Recurring performance and timeout issues. Some processes were retrieving excessively large datasets from MongoDB, and most of the affected ones were crashing.
- CSV & PDF exports
- Report data for the frontend
- List screens
How I found it
User complaints and errors in the logs. While working on a bug ticket I’d often catch related problems too, and either fix them in the same ticket or report them as new ones.
What I did
I redesigned the data-retrieval and processing flows so they stopped loading full datasets: fetching only the fields each process needed, paging or batching the data, and moving filtering and calculations into MongoDB queries.
What changed
Most of these processes had been crashing; after the changes, they stopped. APIs became more responsive and stable.
Keeping production working while it changes.
- Investigated and resolved complex production issues across backend services, APIs, database operations and application workflows.
- Contributed to modernizing legacy application components while keeping existing production workflows compatible.
- Worked with QA and other engineering teams through development, testing and production delivery.
- Took part in the move from a monolith (hosted on EC2, with S3 for file storage and downloads) toward microservices, with hands-on exposure to SQS, Lambda, Fargate and CloudWatch.
Let’s build something useful — aerosama793@gmail.com