Consumer Train & Insurance Website

In 2023 I worked on two high‑traffic consumer websites in Switzerland for public transport and insurance: sbb.ch (Swiss Federal Railways) journey information and the Wetter‑Alarm/GVB property insurance ecosystem. The mandate was to stabilise critical user journeys and deliver targeted improvements without downtime, while aligning with an established design system and a polyglot frontend (SolidJS and framework‑agnostic Web Components).

• Millions of daily requests with sharp commuter and severe‑weather peaks
• Zero‑downtime approach with canary/staged rollouts and fast rollback
• UI brought in line with the design system and accessibility guidance

The work had to respect existing stacks and infrastructure (legacy pages, interactive maps, complex forms, CDN caching and SSR/hydration). I focused on pragmatic upgrades that could be introduced incrementally and verified in production.

• Introduced/extended Web Components to bridge stacks and isolate changes
• Improved render performance and memory use in interactive views (maps, lists)
• Hardened data‑fetch paths with timeouts/retries and schema guards
• Expanded monitoring and error reporting around critical flows

Starting with a rapid assessment, I traced long‑standing production issues to specific race conditions, caching behaviours and brittle integration points. I proposed a plan that could be executed safely alongside ongoing releases and peak traffic windows.

• Root‑cause analysis: Reproduced and isolated intermittent failures; added regression tests
• Process‑safe fixes: Feature flags, staged rollout and observability to verify impact
• Performance: Reduced layout thrash and unnecessary re‑renders in SolidJS and custom elements

For the client‑facing features, I focused on map interactions, form reliability and page responsiveness under load. I ensured changes respected each organisation’s design system and release process.

• Interactive maps: Smoothed pan/zoom, debounced network requests, improved marker clustering
• Forms & flows: Hardened validation and submission, better empty/error states and retries
• Design system alignment: Tokenised styles and accessible components across pages