It's a Wonderbly life

It’s a Wonderbly life

Working for Wonderbly is easily one of the best contracts I’ve ever had. From being warmly welcomed into the team, to being challenged to improve my code development skills and practices; learning how to really fit into a bigger development team and pushing creative problem solving within a set framework to the next level.

Key software and tools used

Wonderbly creates highly personalised printed books for children and adults alike. They have sold over 8 million books in 169 countries and territories, and their titles are available in 12 languages. The degree of personalisation offered to customers varies from names woven into the stories, to characters created with personalised hair, skin and eye colour, hairstyles and even outfits. As part of the development team, I build with Wonderbly’s in-house framework to implement the logic that resolves a customer’s personalised choices into the correct illustration layers, ensuring the same output renders accurately both on screen for preview and in the final files sent to print.

While the broad requirement for the role is front-end development, everyone in the development team has diverse full-stack capabilities. The result is a sharing of skills and techniques, and learning new ways of approaching problems through working with others. After three years working in this team, I have benefited greatly from it, and improved my own work tremendously, helping newcomers to the team and reviewing the work of other team members.

Apart from technical problem-solving, responding to creative requests with tight turnaround times, and producing high-end consumer products for purchase on the website, I’ve derived much pleasure in working with a hugely talented illustration and writing team. I am handed beautiful illustrations and copy in different styles, that lend each new book its own magic, and I have worked to match those styles and do them justice in the code, both for the end consumer, and for my own team, where we strive to keep the code intuitive, clean, and easy to maintain.

I worked on the 2025 best-selling book at Wonderbly (Our Family saves Christmas), and another hugely popular book, Best Cat Ever. Also The best-seller by far in the category of Romance books for 2024, Partner I Love You. In late 2025 and through 2026 I’ve been involved in transitioning the work flow to a content management system, building in many of the features used by developers on the team. I also worked on localisation projects, implementing French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Japanese translations, managing complex, market-specific text formatting and layout.

Back to what I love

The biggest shift from all other work I have done up to now is the one away from marketing, and into production of actual goods. It’s closer to the projects I naturally gravitate to in my spare time, and matches my core interest much more closely; bringing people joy through creativity. It’s been a bonus that it has not only involved my technical skills, but stretched and strengthened them.

Things I’ve learned

Other technologies used in this contract are node.js and typescript, and I’ve learned to work in Storyblok CMS. The books also required writing robust input validation and testing, and all features were delivered through a strict CI/CD workflow in GitHub to ensure reliable updates from staging to production. While I’m no stranger to using AI in code (Gemini and ChatGPT are both great at working with small snippets of code), I’ve recently had the opportunity to make more extensive use of higher-tier AI programs in my workflow; Claude and Co-pilot have both been used across the team to improve accuracy, catch errors early, process more arduous tasks, and suggest ways of tackling complex problems.