Pure Retirement

Project Overview

Pure Retirement brought me onto an existing team to help modernise their broker-facing platform — a Symfony application that needed Vue.js integrated across it. What I found was a development effort split across two teams that couldn't effectively communicate with each other. The frontend team lived in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The backend team owned the PHP and Symfony layer. Neither fully understood what the other needed, integration decisions were getting deferred, and the Vue implementation had stalled at a single partially-working component. The platform wasn't broken, but it wasn't going anywhere either. I became the person who could sit in both conversations at once. Full-stack means exactly that: I understood what the API team was building and I understood what the frontend team needed from it. I stopped the deferral loop. I resolved the bugs that had been blocking Vue from being extended, built the integration architecture properly so it could scale across the rest of the platform, and then did exactly that — extending Vue into every area of the dashboard that needed it, and introducing Tailwind CSS to replace the patchwork of one-off styles that had accumulated. The deployment pipeline ran through Node and NPM, which I managed alongside everything else. Over the course of a year, as Pure Retirement went through significant internal changes and their own staff were let go, they kept me on. By the end of the engagement I was their sole developer, the person the platform depended on. That's not something I say to boast. It's what the work earned. A financial services platform that went from stalled and fragmented to fully dynamic, with a Vue integration running consistently across the entire dashboard and a development process that actually worked. The two teams that had been talking past each other had a functioning pattern for how the frontend and backend should communicate. When a business going through internal upheaval chooses to keep one developer while letting its own staff go, the work speaks for itself. The platform could be built on. That's what they paid for, and that's what they got.