A year ago, I joined La Vitrine as their first technical hire, tasked with bridging the gap between business and technology. Here's what I've learned and accomplished.
Taking Control of the Architecture
My first challenge was understanding and documenting the existing architecture. I discovered all our environments were tied to vendor-hosted accounts, limiting our autonomy.
The most surprising finding was the front-end architecture:
"Based on Webflow layouts with a hydration process (Minze, Squidex) and hand-developed Cloudflare Worker routing. Massive complexity for what is ultimately a fairly basic site."
This technical approach stemmed from La Vitrine's history as a non-profit with limited resources, leading to a patchwork of free PaaS tools.
From Soft Launch to Growth
I arrived during the soft launch of lavitrine.com, followed by a marketing campaign in October. Our focus was two-fold:
- Expanding our cultural offerings by integrating partner data
- Stabilizing and improving the website
I quickly discovered that the cultural industry generally lacks digital literacy. Their systems are often outdated, with little control over their information systems, few internal development resources, and limited digital budgets.
Initially, we spent considerable time providing personalized support to partners – an approach that proved time-consuming and unscalable. We're now developing better documentation, development tools, and integrable SDKs and components.
Key Achievements
Despite these challenges, we've had significant wins:
- Successful website launch
- Regained control of our infrastructure
- Shifted the company culture toward a more digital focus
My approach: "Document quickly, understand the data model thoroughly, and align analyses with infrastructure maintenance and evolution needs. Deliver impact in parallel with necessary but longer-term processes."
Looking Forward
2025 will be a year of major technical initiatives, primarily a gradual migration to a more conventional and maintainable front-end architecture. Other priorities include:
- Refactoring to reduce infrastructure costs
- Improving platform scalability and stability
- Continuing to integrate cultural partners
These goals must be achieved in a more constrained environment, as commercial tensions with the US have led to budget restrictions for many subsidized cultural organizations.
Architect's Takeaways
This year has reinforced several software architecture principles:
- Technical debt is real - Temporary solutions based on budget constraints create complex, hard-to-maintain architectures
- Business-technical alignment is crucial - Especially in sectors with low digital literacy
- Documentation is an investment - Essential for taking control of existing architecture
- Balance immediate impact with long-term vision - Deliver visible improvements while working on deeper architectural transformations