Cleo Innovation, Technology & Agility

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

In 2025, I am most excited to work on some of the updates we have planned for our product. Currently, almost all the configuration needs to be done though a user interface, but we are adding a feature to allow users to optionally configure our product using files they can drop in. This will allow users to easily re-create a system or spin up another instance of it. Users can also keep this configuration in version control if they want so they can easily see any updates that were made to the software. I also like that it requires us to make improvements to the software that affect customers who aren’t going to use that specific feature. Some customers exclusively use our REST API to configure parts of our application, and we are expanding it to support this endeavor so they will be able to configure even more without having to touch a single button.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

This project takes a lot of work and is an ongoing goal for us throughout 2025. We are hoping to have a beta version out by the third quarter of this year and a full release by the end of the year. We are breaking the work down into manageable chunks so we can make steady progress on it throughout the year while continuing to update and add existing features to all of our product lines.

The biggest challenge that we face is the fact that when our product was originally architected, it was not designed to support this at all. We need to figure out a way to add this new feature without breaking the product or re-writing everything. One way we are overcoming that is by expanding our existing REST API. Currently, not everything can be configured through it, but we can add new endpoints and features to it. By leveraging and improving this existing resource, we can get around a lot of those architecture issues and add more functionality for the customers since they can use the REST API when they make updates themselves. I’m working with five other very talented engineers on this project, a few of whom are extremely knowledgeable about the product and a couple who just started working on it.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

In college, I gained experience looking through existing code I had never seen before and learning how to figure out what it was doing and how best to update it. I have also done extensive work with this product, notably the REST API. But the thing that prepared me the most was being willing to learn, knowing how to work with other people and being confident asking questions — and for help. It is impossible for me to know everything about how our product works. I know certain parts very well while my coworkers know other parts very well, and being able to admit when I don’t know something helps us all make a better product in the end.