Six months ago, I joined Lumant as the company's second software engineer. To my surprise, what stood out most wasn't just how much code I'd write, but how quickly I became involved in shaping both the product and the way our engineering team works.
I was incredibly excited to see what working remotely at a fast-moving startup with an active user base would look like, and I saw huge potential in the platform. Six months later, I can safely say it has exceeded my expectations. It's been challenging, rewarding, and one of the best career decisions I've made so far.
This post is a look back at those first six months: what I've learned, the projects I've worked on, the engineering practices we've introduced, and what it's really like building software at startup speed.
Why I Joined: Looking for Speed and Room to Evolve
I’ve always enjoyed environments where things move quickly, where developers have the freedom to make decisions, and where you can experiment with new tools or improve existing systems without unnecessary friction.
Before I joined, the entire technical foundation was built and maintained by just one person: our CTO, René. Seeing how much he had accomplished on his own was impressive to say the least, and it made me realize the huge potential of the project. Good leadership is important, but so is having the right people around you to help turn that vision into reality. I wanted to be that person who could step in, take ownership, and help build the next stage of the platform.
At some of my previous positions, we talked about hiring another developer to help scale the team and share the workload, but it never happened. Getting the opportunity to become that person myself at Lumant was highly motivating, and it gave me a much clearer understanding of where I could contribute and which areas needed my attention the most.
Switching to a fully remote setup was also a huge factor. I saw it as an opportunity to build my own routine, remove the daily commute, and create more focused time throughout the day.
I was looking for a challenge to start the year, and that is exactly what I got. Taking on everything from architecture decisions and DevOps to full-stack development pushed me in ways I hadn't experienced before. Seeing how much I could grow with this opportunity was one of the many reasons these first six months have been such an awesome experience.
The Engineering Journey
No matter how motivated or confident I was, the first month was a big reality check. I quickly realized just how much René had been managing on his own. Keeping multiple projects moving while supporting an active user base is no small task. Looking back, I definitely underestimated how much had already been built before I joined.
It gave me a huge appreciation for the foundation that was already in place. As I started digging deeper into the architecture and understanding how everything worked together, things began to click within the first week, and the pull requests started flowing.
💡 The Tools Behind the Workflow
The stack at Lumant is built on solid, modern tools: Next.js, TypeScript, Prisma, MongoDB, Tailwind/Material UI, and Vercel. Having a modern stack like this allows us to move quickly and ship features fast. Going through my pull requests while writing this, it’s crazy to see that I’ve worked across almost every repository in the project and created over 400 pull requests since joining. These include a mix of feature work, refactors, automated updates, and AI-assisted improvements across the platform.
AI has become a massive part of our day-to-day development workflow. We use Cursor extensively, not just for simple code completion, but for full agentic workflows and automated AI pull request reviews. This means keeping up with the latest AI models has become part of the job itself, as these tools help us move faster and allow us to spend more time on bigger architectural decisions.
✨ Projects That Shaped My First Six Months
As the months rolled on, my responsibilities and the scope of my work quickly expanded. Here are some of my favorite features and improvements I’ve taken the lead on during my time at Lumant:
- 📈 Leveling Up the Workflow: We completely revamped our development workflow into a cleaner, more automated pipeline. I built a custom Discord server and bot for team synchronization, introduced Linear for project roadmaps, and brought in Biome and Playwright for linting and automated testing. To tie everything together, we moved duplicated and shared code into a single centralized
shared artifactspackage. The result? A single source of truth that makes it easier to keep logic consistent across all of our projects. - 🌍 Going Global (Internationalization): When I joined, Lumant was primarily focused on Danish users. Opening the platform up to the world required a large, stack-wide refactor that I ended up leading. This meant touching almost every layer of the platform, including rewriting backend locale resolvers, localizing transactional emails, handling complex international timezones, and setting up multi-currency Stripe checkouts. Today, we have international customers using the platform. Seeing those first global logs appear in production was an incredibly proud milestone for us!
- ✉️ Email Notification Service Cron Job: To keep a large number of users engaged across our instructors' membership clubs and communities, we needed a reliable notification system built from the ground up. This became my first major solo backend challenge at Lumant, and the biggest hurdle was performance. I designed the system to batch-process user data efficiently, allowing heavy background cron jobs to run smoothly without putting unnecessary load on our servers or database. After launching this feature, communities became more active and the platform started feeling more alive even when users weren't actively on the platform.
- 🪄 Multiple UI Reworks: Because hundreds of creators depend on our software for their livelihoods, user experience matters just as much as the code behind it. We set aside a few weeks for me to deep-dive into the frontend and overhaul the interfaces for our membership clubs, lessons, and course modules. By focusing on cleaner navigation and more consistent component structure, these core areas of the platform became significantly easier to use. I love this kind of work because it sits right at the intersection of coding and product thinking. It’s about understanding how people actually use software and removing the friction points that get in their way.
The Importance of Team Connection
While working from my own workspace has been fantastic for my deep-work routines, I’ve learned that putting intentional effort into the social side of the team is just as important. Alongside our weekly team meetings, we’ve done a few other things that have helped strengthen our connection as a team even further.
🗓️ Intensive Team Workshops
We run team workshops every now and then where the full team, or just some members, meet up in person for a day. We use these sessions to tackle complex problems, discuss product direction, and align our roadmap together.
Watching a small team with different personalities and skill sets look at the same product from different angles while working toward the same goal is really awesome. It gives you that genuine feeling of, "This is what we are working for every day."
☀️ The Málaga Workcation
The highlight of the social side so far was our 3-day workcation in Málaga, Spain. It was my first time meeting the team face-to-face.
Between strategy sessions, we spent our time cooking together, doing activities, and simply getting to know each other better. It completely strengthened our team culture and made Lumant feel even more like a team, rather than just a group of people working toward the same goal.
The Takeaway: We're Just Getting Started
The first six months at Lumant have flown by. I’ve learned an incredible amount technically, especially around backend architecture, DevOps, AI models, and building features that scale to support real users. More importantly, though, I’ve learned a lot about taking ownership, prioritizing what matters most, and how important communication and teamwork are.
When hundreds of creators run their businesses on code you pushed, the responsibility is real, but so is the satisfaction of seeing your work make a difference every day.
The best part? It genuinely feels like we're only just getting started. We have some exciting initiatives planned for the rest of 2026, including expanding our AI assistant, LUMI, launching a mobile app, and shipping plenty of other features that aren't ready to be announced yet - So stay tuned! 👋