Neeva

Neeva was a fast-paced startup seeking to reimagine search experiences with differentiating features such as personal account search, bookmarking, large language models (LLMs).

I was hired as a frontend engineer to build new, creative experiences for our users. I also did full-stack work.

Skills and tools

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, GraphQL, PNPM, NextJS, Framer Motion, Radix

• Design: Figma, Framer

• Backend: Go, SQL, Scylla, some Python, some K8

1. Can we bridge the political divide?

As part of our mission to give users more control and agency, I worked with a designer and a team of backend engineers to build a new experience: the “news slider” is a meticulously designed control that can let users view news across the political spectrum. We hoped to empower our users and increase their empathy towards one another.

The slider was the result of weeks of prototyping, followed by user testing internally, with our Makers community and prominent journalists, before eventual release slated for Nov 2022.

Here is a video of the near-final experience:

In process work:

Tools used:

• React, Framer Motion

2. Redesigning the home page

I worked with our Head of Design (@hwi) to create a new homepage, codenamed "Ikea". It was so dubbed because it sought to more effectively communicate Neeva's value proposition with a series of visual building blocks, inspired by successful marketing pages from Amie, Linear and Notion. In 10/2022, the Ikea homepage became the default experience for all traffic.

Screenshots:

In process work, with numerous iterations:

Tools used:

• Figma, Framer

3. Improvements to our Spaces product

Neeva's Spaces was a bookmarking tool that let you save any search result from the web, via the Neeva website or browser extension. For Q2 2022, I took on a PM-like role, leading a team of mobile engineers, Spaces Makers community moderators and designers to polish our offering and introduce new features. I also took on a full-stack and web engineering role.

I rewrote our drag-drop controller logic using a library called "dnd-kit", which provided a smoother, glitch free experience for our web users (compared to an older implementation using "react-beautiful-dnd", which is no longer maintained).

I improved Lighthouse scores by serving Space item images from Cloudinary CDN. This also improved page load time. I wrote a K8 cron job in Go to backfill existing images. I helped coordinate the mobile team to land the necessary API changes for image proxying on iOS and Android.

Lastly, I sourced feedback from our Spaces Makers community to implement a top requested feature: pinning.

Tools used:

• React, Chrome extensions, Go, Cloudinary

4. Improving our web build time

Improving web build times can be a productivity multiplier for the company by helping frontend engineers iterate much faster. In Q1 2022, frontend build times were extremely high, about 10 minutes on average. Our build system used Webpack. Native build tooling (written in Go, Rust etc.) can provide much faster build times.

I drove an effort to improve build times. By tweaking our Webpack source maps, analyzing the slowest plugins, reducing our dependency on SASS, I cut build times to around 5 minutes.

I also experimented with porting our Webpack setup to Vite for local development, further cutting on first-run page load time.

Tools used:

• PNPM, Webpack, Vite, Esbuild