Ango

Ango was an Innovate UK-funded startup building a sustainability-focused product comparison platform. The vision was ambitious: a Chrome extension that would detect products users were viewing online and surface alternatives from more sustainable sources, complete with price comparisons and sustainability ratings. Think of the price comparison features now built into Edge, but with an environmental conscience.

This engagement was transformative for my technical development. It was my first exposure to true microservices architecture in its modern form - Docker containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, hosted on Google Cloud. While I'd worked on distributed systems at Brightside and Holiday Caravans Direct, Ango was where I learned containerisation properly. It was also, I discovered, where I confirmed that I'm a software engineer rather than a DevOps engineer - those YAML files made that very clear.

My primary responsibility was the data ingestion pipeline: building web scraping infrastructure to extract product data from e-commerce sites and standardise it into a common format for comparison. The technical implementation used C# with HttpClient and HTML Agility Pack for standard sites, with Selenium running headless for single-page applications that were becoming increasingly common. The other developer focused on the comparison algorithms while I fed them normalised data.

I also contributed to the React-based Chrome extension - my only production React experience - which displayed a side panel when users viewed products in our catalogue, showing sustainable alternatives with their ratings and prices.

The startup ultimately folded. The core challenge they couldn't solve was sourcing reliable sustainability ratings. They tried multiple approaches, eventually considering hiring humans to manually research companies - a fundamentally unscalable solution. The founders were brilliant - young, probably fresh from university, the kind of smart that made me feel junior again - but the product-market fit problem proved insurmountable. When Innovate UK funding dried up, the team was downsized, and I moved on.