The answer to UI challenges in eCommerce. The story of Patryk, Filip & Storefront UI

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Patryk Tomczyk and Filip Rakowski are the people responsible for Storefront UI – the first Vue.js UI library dedicated to eCommerce. What is their story? Why did they create this project? And finally, how has this helped to grow and develop their careers?

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Patryk Tomczyk’s initial steps in eCommerce were in the vindication industry. He was responsible for building a platform for clients that allows a current view of receivables and facilitates repayment. Later, Patryk worked as an architect and leader in an archiving company. He had to deal with many challenges related to managing a warehouse full of documents and their digitalization. Next, Patryk decided to join Divante. He has been working here for about a year as an architect, technical leader, consultant, and auditor.

“Once I got hired in Divante, I immediately joined the Vue Storefront core team. Together, we agreed on the direction in which VS should go and since then we have been constantly trying to pursue the plan.”

Patryk Tomczyk, Senior Developer at Divante. 

Filip Rakowski’s career in Divante started 3 years ago. At that time, he worked as a Junior Developer. Soon, he engaged in the Vue Storefront project, which helped him to excel in a very short time. He’s also responsible for Storefront UI, a project complementary to Vue Storefront, a powerful PWA frontend for various eCommerce platforms. Today, Filip has an impressive amount of experience. He works as a Senior Frontend Developer and is a Vue Storefront co-founder. Filip’s story is described in detail in the Vue Storefront article.

Challenges in Ecommerce
Filip Rakowski, Senior Developer at Divante, sharing his ideas during a meeting

Patryk and Filip joined forces to build Storefront UI. It’s an independent, Vue.js-based library of UI components, made for developers, designers, and agencies striving to build fabulous storefronts.  

Storefront UI is an answer and solution to real problems in eCommerce

Storefront UI is a library of usable components from which you can build an online store, e.g. buttons, galleries, search bars and more. It’s 100% customizable. You can take a single UI component, a complex module or the whole design system and make it look exactly as you need. It’s free of charge and open-source. The UI library is open to everyone who wants to shape the future and make the shopping experience even better. It’s made for eCommerce, with devotion to modern online commerce and customer  expectations. Excellent for desktop, mobile, and PWAs. 

“It is a product complementary to Vue Storefront, which also has a template system. From the beginning of its existence, we have noticed its various deficiencies, such as problems with updates and modification. When issuing a new template, we concluded that this system must be based on a component system. A complementary Storefront UI project was created that is also used to build templates. However, it can be used not only in Vue Storefront but in any Vue project.”

Filip Rakowski, Senior Developer at Divante

There are plenty of different libraries and components for Vue. Many of them are good, but they cannot be easily adapted to your needs. 

Challenges in Ecommerce
Patryk Tomczyk, Senior Developer at Divante 

“The problem arises when you want to do an implementation for your client who has specific requirements. The requirements may even fit into one library of components, but we are not able to use any other library. There’s an option to rewrite some components, but that’s time-consuming and expensive. Storefront UI is an answer to that problem. It is designed in a way that all its components are 100% customizable. This is something that is not available on the market.”

explained Patryk Tomczyk

The idea of Storefront UI originated much earlier. It’s one of those projects that was waiting for the right time to be executed. 

“We’ve had the idea of ​​an eCommerce library for a long time but didn’t do anything with it. When building the new template, we saw that this is the perfect case to use our idea. We saw that this would solve many of our problems. And that’s how Storefront UI was created.”

Filip Rakowski
The First VueJS UI library dedicated to eCommerce. Start using>

A project which enabled gaining and sharing unique knowledge 

When taking part in a new project, you need to learn a lot: see how others do it, ask people for feedback, and make many decisions. Each project has many different niches that you need to know very well. It was the same with Storefront UI.

“During this project, we had a lot of ideas that had to be confronted. We have had a lot of conversations, which also pays off and helps with further work, both on this and other projects. This motivates us to create a very good project. Especially with the experience we already have, we can do something good faster, and not experiment and err.”

Patryk Tomczyk
Challenges in Ecommerce
Filip Rakowski sharing his ideas during one of the meetings in Divante

Storefront UI is an open-source project, so people who develop it can proudly present it in their portfolio. Anyone can preview it and analyze the code. Storefront UI is an interesting library, a product that is used by many people around the world. It’s the answer to real needs. During this project, Filip and Patryk were able to learn a lot and develop their careers.

“We got to know very deeply some specializations related to the construction of the application. Working on in-company projects, we would not have the opportunity to explore so much. This is a project for developers that allows us to gain unique knowledge.”

Filip Rakowski

Storefront UI, together with Vue Storefront, is one of the most interesting projects in Divante. Other developers and agencies are interested in it. Both Filip and Patryk are invited to share their knowledge and experience at various major Vue conferences in Europe and around the world. This helps to promote not only the projects and the company, but also build their careers. 

Open Source and Open Minds  

It was the first time for Patryk Tomczyk to work with such a big and important open-source project. After one year, he boldly expresses that he fell in love with open-source and the community spread around the world

“At the beginning of my career in Divante, I was surprised by people’s openness and willingness to share knowledge. I constantly hear about some new ideas or projects. I had never seen a situation where after a trip to a conference, colleagues write an e-mail to everyone with a report from the event. Thanks to this, the whole tribe or even company can learn from this event.”  

Patryk Tomczyk
Challenges in Ecommerce
Patryk Tomczyk during a meeting

Open source and open minds are the basis of Divante’s culture. Employees always enjoy the good atmosphere in the company. One of the reasons behind it is the tribes model which is all about people. The tribes model has helped Divante to grow and build an agile, modern organization without losing the company’s DNA and it’s great atmosphere.

“Adaptation to changes, openness, and honesty – these are the things I value most in Divante. You can always get along and talk about problems. I recently adopted a dog, and it was not a problem for anyone that I would work mainly from home for some time. We can talk about what can be done better. There is a great desire to work and create new things, what we call ” drive”. And of course, people! Divante is made up of a wonderful team that makes this company a unique place.”  

Patryk Tomczyk
Challenges in Ecommerce
Patryk Tomczyk, Senior Developer at Divante, in Divante Cafe

Want to know more about the people working in Divante? There are more examples of win-win situation type stories — stories where the employee was able to develop and follow his interests, and the company was able to make the best use of his talent and growth. Follow our blog for more. Maybe soon we will describe your story?  

Published November 12, 2019