Consultant for Colissimo for the 'Webhook' Project, Artik Consulting

About Artik Consulting

Artik Consulting is a consulting firm, founded in 2009, specializing in IT architecture. With over 70 consultants, Artik Consulting supports the IT directors of large public and private companies in their digital transformation projects and the design of architectures that meet new business challenges. Artik Consulting’s main clients include French groups such as La Poste, BNP Paribas, Covéa, Kering, and it also collaborates with start-ups and universities.

Source: Artik Consulting

Context

• I joined Artik Consulting for my end-of-year internship. I first underwent internal training on various technologies, allowing me to acquire a solid foundation. Additionally, I participated in the development of a response to a tender from ESCP. ESCP wants to implement new visualization and analysis features and facilitate exchanges between the school and its various stakeholders (candidates, students, etc.). The requirements include the use of a star schema database and the Jaspersoft visualization tool.

• I was assigned to La Poste Colis (Colissimo) and integrated into Squad 1 to work on an assigned project: Webhook. This project involves implementing a new method for real-time parcel tracking, relying on webhooks to update the progress status of parcels without direct requests to the servers. This solution targets businesses (B2B) with a large volume of parcels to track, thereby reducing their impact on Colissimo’s servers and optimizing their performance. An MVP (“Minimum Viable Product”) of the project has already reduced the number of daily calls from 5.9 million to 1.7 million, a 70% reduction in traffic.

Achievements

• During my training through mini-projects, I became proficient in:

  • Angular, a JavaScript framework for developing dynamic web pages.
  • Spring, a Java framework for creating backend services like APIs.
  • Kafka, for real-time data stream processing.
  • Spark, for analyzing large amounts of data.
  • Elasticsearch, for indexing and searching data.
  • Kibana, for visualizing this data.

• For drafting the response for ESCP, it was decided to create dashboard examples similar to ESCP’s use case. For this, we took the example of a charitable association with donations, donors, donation pledges, and advertising campaigns. I was in charge of generating this data using the Python library “Faker” and conducting preliminary research on donation differences based on population and country to obtain realistic data. Additionally, I became proficient in Talend tools for transforming the database into a star schema and explored the various possibilities offered by Jaspersoft Studio and Server.

Source: La Poste

• During my mission at La Poste Colis (Colissimo), by joining Squad 1, I was able to observe and participate in the various processes of the Agile Scrum method, project management, and the deployment of projects in different environments in a professional setting. As part of the industrialization of this project and continuous improvement, I am involved in migrating the project to the Spring Boot framework, particularly through the implementation of API features and message mapping for the various Kafka topics.