SecondSense
Software Engineer (Contract)
August 2025 – September 2025
Redesigned the wish creation experience and built the backend matching pipeline for personalized luxury resale alerts.
5-step wizard demo
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The Problem
Frontend friction
The original wish creation flow asked users to navigate too many fields at once. For a customer profile that valued speed and simplicity, the experience felt heavier than it needed to be.
Backend value delivery
A saved wish only became valuable when the system could reliably compare it against inventory and notify the user when relevant products appeared.
Designing a Faster Wish Creation Flow
I converted a long, scroll-heavy form into a guided multi-step flow. Each screen asked for only the information needed at that moment, which reduced cognitive load and made the experience feel faster and more intuitive.
Building the Backend Concierge Pipeline
Once a user created a wish, the backend concierge turned that preference data into personalized product alerts. Scheduled matching jobs compared saved wishes against newly ingested luxury inventory. Matching products were ranked, inserted into reusable email templates, and delivered through an asynchronous notification workflow with retry handling, bounce processing, and delivery tracking.
Key Engineering Decisions
Scheduled processing
Daily and weekly matching runs processed saved wishes without blocking the user-facing request path.
Personalized recommendations
The matching service compared saved preferences against inventory and transformed relevant products into personalized alerts.
Reliable delivery
Queued email delivery, retry handling, and bounce processing reduced the impact of transient delivery failures and invalid addresses.
Production visibility
Delivery logging and metrics made it easier to track send status, retries, and failures.
Outcome
300+ wish subscriptions created in the first 7 days of launch
The project combined a lower friction frontend experience with a backend workflow that continued delivering value after the initial interaction.