cf.me (Conferatu Inc.) was my first engagement through Toptal as a contractor developer. I was quite new to freelancing and I did my first ever interview through Toptal’s matching process. To this day I am still feeling lucky to have had an amazing first engagement which also spawned my second engagement within Toptal (shades.news).

cf.me was a news startup that aggregates related news from different sources and merges them within a retro styled UI that tries to explain context of the related news in all aspects and viewpoints. Their content team was summarizing news to bite-size informations. Due to being a startup, their team was quite small where they have outsourced an ios application and was building their backend with firebase and sanity. Sanity was their choice of CMS which helped their editors to input sourced and summarized news easily.

When I joined the cf team, I was directly working with their only technical team member which was also the CTO. I was tasked to develop a web platform that is similar to ios application’s UI/UX. In less than 3 months I have completed cf.me webpage with Next.JS by utilizing build time static page generation. This resulted in a quite performant webpage that utilized custom animations.

After 3 months of engagement, our web page was driving most of cf’s main traffic (which was still in closed beta) and it helped us grow the audience. We decided to move the engagement to an hourly basis and work only when something comes up. At the end of 2022 cf.me team decided to pivot the application to shades.news and discontinued cf.me webpage and apps.