Less is More in Software Engineering

We are in the middle of a big digital transformation at RS Components to modernise RS Online from a monolithic Java application to a modern cloud-based micro-services architecture. This will allow us to innovate quickly and deliver improved experiences to our customers.

Two members of our product engineering team, Andy Roberts and Daljit Summan, recently delivered a talk at February’s JS Roundabout meetup, held at RS Components’ London office, entitled Less is More.

Starting with an overview of RS Online’s past, present, and future architecture, the talk focused on some of the learnings that we have derived from our digital transformation and how we are trying to achieve more by doing less.

We are doing this by building a set of internal tools and frameworks that bake in the common functionality that all our product engineering teams need in order to build out the new RS Online.

One of these frameworks, Atlas, is used to power the web experiences that our teams are creating. By including a suite of common features and behaviours out of the box, we are enabling teams to move faster and save weeks of duplicated effort.

The second half of the talk focussed on Atlas and the reasons behind why we created it, the approach we took and the learnings we have taken from creating a framework for other engineers to use.

Hopefully, other engineers will be inspired to create similar frameworks for their own organisations and deliver some of the benefits that we have seen by following this approach.

Polyglot engineers wanted!

If you are passionate about Java or JavaScript tools join our team!