Armstrong Transport Group
Consolidating a fragmented legacy frontend onto React
Brought in as a senior React engineer, and became closely involved in the architecture and technical direction.
Dec 2019 – Apr 2021
The situation
Armstrong Transport was moving off a fragmented legacy frontend estate and needed a foundation that could carry several very different products at once: client-facing applications, internal sales tools, onboarding experiences for prospective clients, and an application used by truck drivers in the field.
My role
Senior React engineer, working across architecture and technical direction alongside feature delivery.
The challenge
There was real pressure to ship features quickly, and a foundation that had to account for accessibility, reusability, maintainability and long-term scale at the same time. I argued for establishing those foundations early rather than taking short-term solutions that would need expensive rework later — and then had to deliver features while doing it.
The outcome
The work created a clear path off the legacy platform and toward a reusable product ecosystem, with accessibility and maintainability built into the foundation rather than retrofitted. The component library was adopted across frontend applications, which meant later products started from a shared base instead of a blank page.
In more detail
The estate was not one legacy application but several, written at different times against different frameworks. That made the interesting question less “how do we port this” and more “what do all of these actually share”.
The driver-facing product was the clearest example of why the shared foundation mattered. It needed load information, location and tracking, measurements and scaling, route and map visualization, and potential loads along a route — a genuinely different interface from the internal sales tools, built from the same components.
Facing something similar? A strategy session is the fastest way to find out whether this kind of work applies to your situation.
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