CASE FILE: MeisterTask
Summary
MeisterTask is a task-management product used by millions of people — Kanban boards, project dashboards, automations, integrations, the full suite. I joined Meister in 2018 as a backend engineer and stayed through 2024, eventually working at staff level across the platform.
MeisterTask was created in 2015, and my job was focused around adding to and and keeping it running. That means shipping features into a mature product with real users who depend on it daily, keeping an eye on monitoring and contiuous refactoring. There is no single dramatic launch to point to — the work was sustained, cross-functional, and cumulative.
On the backend I worked across the Rails application, the GraphQL API, background job infrastructure with Sidekiq, and the MySQL data layer. A significant chunk of the work was API design and evolution — MeisterTask serves native iOS, Android, and desktop clients alongside the web app, so the API surface is large and changes need to be careful.
I led the migration to Kubernetes, moving the production infrastructure from a more traditional setup into a containerised deployment. Alongside that I introduced OpenTelemetry-based observability, giving the team distributed tracing and structured telemetry across the stack for the first time.
Beyond infrastructure, the work was product engineering. Building features, fixing performance problems, refactoring aging subsystems, reviewing code, mentoring engineers, and making the kind of small daily decisions that keep a large codebase habitable over years.
The product had paying teams, enterprise customers, and SLA expectations — the usual constraints of real production software where mistakes cost actual money and downtime is not theoretical.