---
slug: katanapim
title: "KatanaPIM — Scaling a PIM Platform for 60+ Clients"
company: "KatanaPIM"
role: "Sr. Software Developer"
period: "Feb 2023 — Present"
location: "Remote · India"
summary: "Led the React migration of a legacy .NET MVC frontend, replaced Webpack with Rspack for a 65% build-time cut, bumped TypeScript 5 → 7, and containerized .NET Core services for Linux deployment on a PIM platform serving 60+ enterprise clients."
tags: ["React", "TypeScript", "Rspack", "Jotai", "React-Query", ".NET Core", "Docker", "MSSQL", "GitLab CI"]
---

# KatanaPIM — Scaling a PIM Platform for 60+ Clients

## Context

KatanaPIM is a product information management platform that normalizes, enriches and distributes millions of product records across multiple e-commerce channels. By early 2023 the frontend was a maturing .NET MVC codebase with ad-hoc JavaScript — hard to evolve, slow to build, and expensive to onboard new engineers onto.

I joined as a senior developer to modernize the stack without disrupting the 60+ enterprise clients already in production.

## Problem

- **Frontend velocity was capped**: every feature required touching Razor views, jQuery, and bespoke plumbing.
- **Build times kept growing**: Webpack builds pushed past the 3-minute mark, killing feedback loops.
- **Deployment was brittle**: .NET Core services were deployed bare-metal with manual runbooks.
- **Scale anxiety**: product data volumes were climbing faster than our tooling could keep up.

## Approach

### 1. React migration, page by page

Rather than a big-bang rewrite, we ported screens incrementally to ReactJS behind the existing Razor shell. We co-located state with components using **Jotai** for fine-grained, testable atoms, and standardized server state on **React-Query** for caching, retries, and optimistic updates.

### 2. Webpack → Rspack

The biggest quality-of-life win. Drop-in swap for our config, plus small tweaks to the module resolution to get parity. First cold builds dropped **from ~180s to ~60s — a 65% cut**. HMR became instant, and CI builds freed up capacity across the team.

### 3. TypeScript 5 → 7 upgrade

Bumped the codebase from **TypeScript 5 to TypeScript 7**. Worked through the breaking changes — stricter type inference, updated `lib.d.ts` targets, and deprecated flags — module by module. Faster type-check on CI and cleaner error diagnostics in the editor paid back the migration cost quickly.

### 4. Containerizing .NET Core for Linux

I containerized the .NET Core services with Docker and aligned local + CI + production on Linux images. Deploys moved to GitLab CI pipelines, removing the "works on my machine" and cutting the cost of spinning up new environments.

### 5. PIM feature work

Built core PIM features: import/export workflows spanning multiple e-commerce platforms, bulk editing UIs over millions of rows, and rich relationship views for SKUs, variants and categories. Ran Scrum planning and epic meetings to keep backend + frontend + data teams aligned.

## Impact

- **65% faster builds** — happier engineers, shorter CI cycles.
- **React now powers** the critical PIM flows used by 60+ customers.
- **Reliable, reproducible deploys** via Dockerized .NET Core on GitLab CI.
- **Upgraded to TypeScript 7** — faster CI type-checks and sharper editor diagnostics across the React codebase.
- **Foundations in place** for the next wave of product work — integrations, AI enrichment, and marketplace connectors.

## Takeaways

- Incremental migration beats a rewrite when the business depends on the existing app every day.
- Build tooling is leverage — cutting 2 minutes off every build pays for itself within a week.
- Owning both frontend and deployment pipelines unlocked changes that would have stalled in silos.