Behind the Screens of The Development Team at Lendahand

Did you know the whole Lendahand platform is developed, managed and designed in house? Our development team today is run by two wonderful colleagues who build and maintain the entire platform used by thousands of investors.

Over the past months, Diosa and Jan Metten have worked intensely on two major new releases for our investment platform. All while keeping things running smoothly. 

Perfect timing to learn from them what happens behind the screens!

 

Working as a Two-Person Team

When Jan Metten comes to the office, you can bet he’s there before you are. “I start early, so when I’m in the office, I have a nice and quiet first hour and a half of work,” he says. For Diosa, the day simply starts with coffee, emails, and checking the calendar. “Being outside for a bit helps me reset,” she says. “So I try to workout before work or spend a few minutes on my balcony from time to time.”

Every day, Diosa and Jan Metten have a daily standup to stay aligned. They collaborate most with each other. They have ad hoc chats whenever a problem pops up and structurally do code reviews as a quality check.

“We do the same work, on the same applications, with the same goal for the product,” Diosa says. “A good collaboration will elevate the quality of the work, while a bad one will drag the whole team down.” 

“Exactly, we help each other with any issues. When we develop something new, we present how we envision building it so we can get feedback from each other as well,” Jan Metten adds.

 

 

How They Build Something New

Development projects at Lendahand are usually defined by our product owner, who prioritizes what the development team will handle next. From there, the split between the two developers comes naturally. “Who does what is usually an obvious choice,” Diosa shares, “depending on our skillset and familiarity with the application.”

Recently, the team worked on two different projects for the platform:

 

The Profit-Loss Calculator by Diosa

When you log in on your account on Lendahand, you now see a small banner showing an overview of your portfolio performance. The banner may look simple, but it involved months of calculation logic, testing, and optimization. 

“Ninety percent of the work was writing the logic for the calculations,” Diosa explains. “With countless edge cases across different types of users and investments, I spent weeks iterating, testing, refining, and then building the front-end version that investors now see on the platform.”

The last step of making the whole profit-loss calculator performant was surprisingly tough. “The calculations were so heavy on our systems that I had to do a lot of optimisations to get them fast enough to release!”

One part Diosa truly loved about this project? “I enjoyed digging into the maths behind the finance. That was something I hadn’t gotten to do yet.”

 

The Passkeys by Jan Metten 

For Jan Metten, introducing Passkeys was an opportunity to work with completely new technology. Something he thrives on! 

Passkeys are a login method that offer an extra layer of protection to your Lendahand account. In order to make sure it would be available for all investors to use, Jan Metten began with a prototype to see how it might work. “It worked well,” he says, “and then I adapted the code from the prototype to fit into our existing system. After that came an extensive testing phase across many devices and browsers.”

 

“I enjoyed working with new technology, learning new things.”

 

Developers’ Work in the Spotlights

If we ask our team, there are two words we need to remember when thinking of the often not well understood work of developers: it is both complex and creative. 

The complexity of what they do is something both Diosa and Jan Metten wish more people could see. “There are so many moving parts whenever you touch any part of the system,” Diosa explains. “Yes, and a developer also needs to be really creative!” Jan Metten ads. 

Behind every seemingly simple experience is a long chain of writing, decision-making, testing, and breakthroughs. 

With two big projects checked off and released, it’s time to look ahead. Next up, Diosa will be working on improving Lendahand’s annual reports so that they are more detailed and useful for investors. If she could choose any project to work on, it would be some kind of chatbot that takes care of almost all communications and support needed: “A good-working chatbot would relieve the work on our support team a lot! We’re a small team and I’d love to free up more time for people to do creative, fulfilling work this way.”

 

From ensuring secure logins to working on smarter insights, Diosa and Jan Metten help ensure that every investor has a reliable platform to create social impact. Their work may be behind the screens, but its influence reaches far beyond them. And with new improvements on the way, the Lendahand platform continues to grow right along with the communities it serves!