Tactiv Studios

September 2023. I started at Tactiv Studios as a UI/UX design intern. The role was exactly what that title suggests: Figma files, wireframes, interface layouts, and interactive prototypes handed off to the engineering team to build. It was a good place to start. Tactiv was a real company with real clients and real deadlines, and working there even as an intern meant the design decisions had actual consequences. Something designed poorly would be built poorly. Something designed well made the developer's job easier. That feedback loop was immediately apparent even from the design seat.

The first few weeks were about getting calibrated. Every company has its own way of working, its own standards for what counts as done, its own rhythm between design review and development handoff. Learning how the team communicated, what level of fidelity was expected in a prototype before it went to engineering, how much creative latitude existed within a client's brand guidelines. These things only become clear by doing them.

Two projects defined that initial period. An HR Management System and a Home Loan Application, both designed in Figma with enough detail that a developer could build directly from the screens without filling in gaps or making judgment calls. The process involved more thinking about user flows and edge cases than about making things look nice. What happens when a form submission fails. How a user navigates back to a previous step without losing data. Where error states appear and how prominent they need to be. These were design problems, not visual problems, and working through them built a way of thinking about interfaces that carried forward into everything after.

Then came the overnight engineering meetup.

I tagged along one night, more out of openness on their part than any particular intention. It was not a formal training session. It was the team working on actual client projects, moving through Angular and TypeScript and the specific patterns Tactiv used across its builds. Watching how they approached component architecture, how they handled responsive breakpoints, how they read a Figma file and made decisions about what to build and in what order. That one night changed something. I got to see the whole picture from the other side of the handoff, and I think my energy that night was obvious enough that they noticed it.

Shortly after, they invited me to join properly as a frontend engineer. October 2023. The design internship became a front-end role, and the work shifted from specifying what things should look like to actually building them.

The transition was immediate and concrete. Pixel-perfect Angular implementations from Figma designs, component structures that matched the design system without drifting, consistent behavior across iOS, Android, and web using Ionic Framework. Multiple client projects running in parallel meant constant context switching. Finishing one implementation and picking up a different client's codebase the same afternoon. The speed and variety were demanding in the best way.

Something worth naming: the months I spent designing interfaces turned out to be directly useful in building them. Understanding why a layout was structured a certain way made it easier to implement it correctly. Knowing what the designer intended at the spacing and hierarchy level meant fewer questions back and forth and fewer rounds of revision. The handoff distance that normally exists between design and engineering had already been crossed, and that made the work move faster and land closer to what clients expected.

There was also a Flutter project during that stretch, picked up for one client to broaden what was possible on mobile. Short engagement, but it added another frame of reference for how mobile interfaces behave differently from web and why mobile-first constraints require different decisions at the component level.

The team at Tactiv was collaborative in a way that made learning feel sustainable rather than overwhelming. Working alongside people who took the craft seriously, who cared about whether the code was clean and the implementation faithful, set a standard for what good professional work looked like. It was also the first real experience of shipping something for an actual client.

The six months from October 2023 to March 2024 were the first six months of engineering as a real job. The learning curve was real. But Tactiv Studios was where the habit of treating front-end development as a proper craft first took hold, and where tagging along to one overnight session changed the direction of everything that came after.