Losant IoT Platform

app.losant.com

Losant's enterprise IoT Platform enables customers to create experiences with connected IoT devices using the platform's low code workflow engine. Examples of the types of solutions customers can build are (but not limited to):

• Asset Tracking
• Conditioned-based Maintenance
• Environmental, Social and Governance
• Smart Environments

Lead Front-end Software Engineer Role

After 2 years as a Senior Front-end Software Engineer at Losant, I was promoted to Lead Front-end Software Engineer. While having the responsibilities of a Senior Front-end Software Engineer, I am responsible for leading the Front-end Software Engineering team and keeping them engaged with development of new features and platform maintenance. My role as a Lead Front-end Software Engineer:

• Work remotely with Developers and Engineering Managers to deliver best implementation of features for the Internet of Things (IoT) platform.
• Develop new features and continually maintain and enhance existing functionality of the IoT platform.
• Work with the Director of Product to design and develop a Design System used to unify the User Interface of the IoT platform.
• Coordinate work among team members.
• Execute team guidelines for software testing.
• Engage with each team member through weekly meetings to provide team and engineering updates.
• Coach Junior and Intern level team members.
• Facilitate career growth for each team member based on their career interests.

Challenges

I was responsible for library upgrades which introduced various challenges. For example, upgrading to React 18 from React 17 required handling many deprecation’s within the code such as the use of string refs, unsafe methods, and findDomNode. React 18 also made the Enzyme testing library obsolete and many unit tests were written with Enzyme. I spearheaded and delegated the effort to handle both code deprecation’s and to migrate Enzyme tests over to the React Testing Library.

I was also responsible for maintaining our Front-end build tools. The Losant Platform used Webpack 4 for local and production environment builds for many years. The Webpack plugins became obsolete. To ensure the continuity of Losant’s platform, I had the challenge of upgrading to Webpack 5. Through careful understanding of Webpack’s documentation and information that was available on the web, I was able to migrate the configurations for each environment. In that process, I was able to upgrade all of the Webpack plugins that were being used.

Other than library upgrades and maintaining build tools, I was responsible for ensuring that our Unit Tests were healthy. The platform’s front-end component Unit Tests did not mock API requests. The Unit Tests also did not tear down Fake Timers or handle Promises after each test has completed. As a result, Jest errors, timeouts, and random test failures occurred during test runs.

I worked with other Engineers on my team to apply testing best practices on a case by case basis. One strategy I used was to ensure that all Redux Actions were mocked out. By doing that the Thunk middleware would not run causing API requests to be fired. Another strategy I used is to ensure we were testing Class based React components while not using the Redux connect method. Finally, another strategy was to throw an error when a test intercepted an outgoing requests.

To address the Unit Test tear down issues, I implemented a global setup file to handle common cases such as detecting when Jest is using fake timers and to run all pending timers after each test. Other strategies include ensuring React component state updates do not happen after the test has completed by awaiting the final visual state of the React component.

Senior Front-end Software Engineer Role

As a Senior Front-end Software Engineer at Losant, I developed new features for the platform. The Instance Manager is one such feature that allows customers to manage multiple organizations used within a single enterprise company. It is intended for use by Administrators at a large scale, Resellers, Losant partners, and Enterprise customers that have a private installation of the Losant Platform. Apart from adding new features to the platform, I am responsible for the overall maintenance of the User Interface. My role as Senior Front-end Software Engineer:

• Become knowledgeable of the IoT platform that combines the collection and visualization of data with edge computing and integration of connected devices that provide enterprises with data insights.
• Follow business requirements to develop software features that enables customers to build IoT workflows that are meaningful to their application using JavaScript and React.
• Research and quickly resolve IoT Platform User Interface defects.
• Write front-end unit tests for React components using the React Testing Library and Jest.
• Perform code reviews to ensure quality and style standards set by the development team are met.