Three services in three months

Overview

In a three-month freelance engagement at CreativeDock I built three Kotlin/Spring Boot microservices from scratch (ticketing, booking and subscription) and fixed the CI and deployment plumbing they shipped through.

What I built

• Ticketing, booking and subscription services, with their APIs and contracts defined up front; I led the architecture decisions for the engagement.
• Integration tests against real dependencies with SpringMockK and Testcontainers.

CI that keeps up

The existing GitLab CI pipeline had stalled builds. I diagnosed them, expanded runner capacity and added a dedicated build-verification phase, and build queue times dropped from hours to minutes.

Running in production

• I ran the Kubernetes workloads through Argo CD, with automated sync keeping deployments in line with the desired state.
• I shipped improvements to running production services in the existing AWS environment: S3 for images, SQS for messaging and CloudWatch for logs.

Results

• Three services from zero in three months.
• CI build queues down from hours to minutes.