Success Stories in AdTech | See Our Impact at Amsterdam Standard

The Problem

The project faced many challenges back in the day: lots of legacy code, high staff rotation and the architecture that allowed for the mixing of different products. Unable to deliver new features without causing side effects in other areas, our client struggled.

The ultimate consequence: growth plans have been completely blocked by the system that was no longer serving its purpose.

The Journey

We interviewed Alek, our team lead, who worked on this Adtech case:

"When I jumped fresh into the project, I was faced with a huge wall of mixed and matched technologies. With each new product, a new tech framework was adopted - which caused a large amount of confusion, lack of unification, and onboarding new team members took much longer than usual."

According to Alek, the toughest challenge was to grasp all the parts of the system and combine them into one cohesive spot. Alek says, "Even though rewriting from scratch always sounds scary, this time it really proved to be the only way for us to go.

We did a quick round of research and figured out which framework we wanted to use. Together with the team and the client, we settled on a PHP and React stack. We started migrating all the standalone apps into the same system, both frontend and backend."

Alek remarks the process went smoothly - having the initial code in place, the business requirements were clear and already thought through.The team's focus was purely on building the codebase in a way that supports multiple products, making it 100% ready for growth this time. Alek's direction settled the team and code into the correct slots.

The whole team built a lot of domain knowledge along the way, which gave them confidence in the solution they chose. Rewriting the codebase doesn't always mean only sunken cost and lost time; there's so much you can already learn from the existing state. Building a stable, scalable system should be the ultimate goal.

The Conclusion

The AdTech world is a rapidly evolving landscape with a continuous push towards automation. Aligning with ever-changing environments is a must. From Alek's experience, the key to staying ahead is modularization and independence of features.

It was a decision made early on with the client that has paid off. This has not only paved the way for new growth possibilities but also revitalized the project, reducing staff rotation and sparking enthusiasm among engineers and Product Managers for the innovations yet to come.