Kotlin Backend Developer

Brave New World

This role completely changed the way I looked at backend development. Until then, most of my experience had been centered around Spring Boot applications. At Wabi I was introduced to Kotlin, serverless architectures, event-driven systems and data engineering on AWS.

Wabi was a Coca-Cola startup with the objective to create a platform where users could buy from small businesses with free delivery.

For me, it was a completely new stack: Kotlin, AWS as the cloud platform, and a strong focus on data engineering and ETL. Also, Spring Boot was deemed too slow on startup, so I also got to take a look into Quarkus and Micronaut.

Entering the Data

The team’s responsibility was to implement and evolve AWS Lambdas focused on analyzing events generated by other products, to then store the related event data and content in our data lake. My first few months on Wabi were spent learning Kotlin and familiarizing myself with the company product and processes. Shortly after, I was tasked to evaluate different frameworks to run our new serverless functions.

Additionally, I got to experience how AWS Glue worked for ETL. Our processes extracted valuable information from the events and were stored in S3 as Parquet files according to business specifications, to later be exploited via AWS Athena.

A Sad Ending

At the last quarter of 2022, there was an internal restructuring of leadership in Coca-Cola, which ended up with the company deciding to fully externalize the project, reducing the teams to the bare minimum (in our case, only the Team Lead remained).

Although the project ended earlier than expected, the technologies and architectural patterns I learned here would become an important part of my backend toolkit.