Digitalando

Overview

Digitalando set out to help businesses navigate the digital era. What began as a comparator for tech solutions grew into a large, multi-module ecosystem connecting companies with software, services, talent and technological guidance.

I joined during an advanced stage of development and worked across the final months of the project as a frontend developer. My focus was the React frontend — building and refactoring features across many modules, and systematically raising the platform's quality.

What I worked on

• Built and improved marketplace components — cards, filters, search and UI modules.
• Refactored complex components (uploaders, galleries, forms, modals, sliders) for maintainability.
• Improved performance and consistency across the blog, digital profiles, corporate and admin areas.
• Introduced accessibility fixes in dozens of components and standardized error-handling patterns.
• Improved i18n usage and added missing ES/EN translations.
• Collaborated with the backend team — minor endpoints and integration flows — and debugged routing and context issues.

Raising platform quality

A core part of my role was lifting the app's global quality scores. Through systematic restructuring, fixes and optimizations, I helped take SEO, Accessibility and Best Practices to a perfect 100/100 each.

• Refactored React components to avoid unnecessary re-renders and replaced deprecated patterns.
• Lazy-loaded heavy modules to shrink the initial bundle, and removed unused libraries and dead code.
• Improved semantic HTML and added missing aria-labels, alt text, landmarks and roles.
• Optimized images and media loading and tightened responsive consistency across dozens of views.
• Improved metadata, OpenGraph tags and document structure.

The numbers

With their labels attached, because a Lighthouse category score and a Core Web Vital measure very different things and the difference is worth being honest about:

• Largest Contentful Paint: 6.7s → 3.2s — a 52% cut, and the one users actually feel, since it's the moment the main content finishes painting.
• Full page load: down ~44% — everything settled, not just the first meaningful paint. A different metric from LCP, which is why the two percentages don't match.
• Lighthouse SEO score: 82 → 100 — worth naming precisely: that's the technical audit checklist (crawlable links, metadata, valid document structure), not search ranking. It says the foundations are correct, nothing more.

Measured with Lighthouse, taking the median of several runs rather than a single pass — one run varies enough to manufacture a result on its own.

3.2s is real progress, not a finish line. The threshold for a "good" LCP is 2.5s, so the landing page ended up in the middle band, and I'd rather say that than round it into a win. The remaining budget sat in things that weren't mine to delete: a background video the marketing team had built the landing around, and the analytics and consent tags the business ran on. Getting under 2.5s meant either renegotiating those assets or a deeper migration — neither of which belongs in a short-term optimization pass. The next step I'd have argued for was serving the video behind a poster frame and deferring the third-party tags until after first paint, which is a conversation with marketing more than a ticket for engineering.

The platform

Digitalando was big in scope — a set of interconnected modules rather than a single product:

• Marketplace — software comparison, a services marketplace, freelance talent discovery and public-interest tech events, with rich filtering and search.
• Corporate tools — corporate profiles, team management, services and certifications, and a documentation system.
• Digital profiles — personal identity pages with experience, education, languages and skill-based dashboards.
• Recruitment & talent — vacancies, candidate matching, advanced talent search and a recruiter dashboard.
• Content & community — a blog with editor, testimonials, demo experiences and full ES/EN multilanguage support.
• Admin panel — events, services, certifications and user/corporate oversight, plus AI-powered recommendations.

Tech & approach

The frontend is built with React, React Router and TanStack React Query, with a shadcn/ui (Radix-based) component layer over TailwindCSS, forms via React Hook Form + Zod, internationalization with i18next, payments through Stripe, and SEO/metadata via react-helmet — plus charts, Google Maps, reCAPTCHA and a Capacitor build for mobile.

Most of the work was inside a mature, evolving codebase: adopting component-reuse patterns, introducing custom hooks to simplify shared logic, and migrating legacy components into the updated UI system — all while keeping new code aligned with the platform's accessibility and SEO rules.

Status

Digitalando is no longer in operation — the company behind it shut down. The screenshots above capture parts of the platform as it ran, with no private business data exposed.