Estate settlement is a sector I've worked in for several years: an estate portal with a dynamic step flow, a large-scale back-end modernisation to Kotlin and Vert.x with Keycloak and MariaDB, and a micro-frontend architecture that keeps years-old AngularJS productive alongside Angular 16. Bereaved relatives walk through it during an emotionally heavy time in their lives.
What makes this domain particular is that technology and human experience sit extremely close together. Someone who has just lost a loved one shouldn't have to fight a form. The steps must be logical and understandable, the language must not get unnecessarily formal, and the visual calm must invite rather than push away — without legal correctness suffering underneath.
An estate portal is also business-critical: it can't go offline. For the back-end replacement we therefore worked in phases with dual writes and targeted shadow reads, so we could compare old and new behavior before flipping the switch. For the front-end we deliberately chose a micro-frontend instead of a rewrite, so old and new could coexist for years.
Substantively, settling an estate is anything but a fixed path. Not every situation follows the same route: assets differ, arrangements differ, the composition of relatives differs. The step flow itself is therefore a dynamic engine with a main route, branches based on answers, and smaller sub-processes that surface at the right moments.
Under the hood there's a lot of work in identity (Keycloak), email communication via an online campaign mailer, integrations with external registers, and a data layer that is both auditable and performant. Each one a place where a defect only hurts when it's already too late — and so exactly where I like to invest in observability and testability.
What makes this work attractive is that technology here really solves something for people. Every settlement that goes smoothly is one that doesn't pull bereaved relatives out of their grief. For me this remains a sector where care, continuity, and empathy come together.