When the New World Trading Company pitched their idea to me as "A bit like the sorting hat from Harry Potter," I was in. Realizing that this meant connecting to an HR API, building an admin dashboard, and exporting everything daily to a third party made me a bit more hesitant!

The most important part of the project was helping to strip back the requirements to create a foundation that covered what the client really needed, leaving plenty of room for future additions. I chose Firebase as the backend, allowing me to quickly create and push features. For the front-end, I utilized a React, TypeScript, and Styled Components template I had created for exactly this purpose.

The hardest part of the project was working with live data that needed to be updated and manipulated daily. The key to tackling this was creating logs of performed operations and regular backups for the worst-case scenario. Writing about this project without using more Harry Potter puns was the real challenge.

When a friend bought his first 3D printer, it sparked his ambition to turn it into a business. He wanted to share the wonder of rapid prototyping with people who didn't have the space, money, or inclination to buy their own printer. When he asked me if I would be interested in helping him build a website to facilitate this, I jumped at the chance, because I had a laundry list of things I wanted to print myself but no means to do it.

We used React and Firebase to create a production app allowing people to upload and view their 3D models, select options, and order prints. Stripe integration facilitated purchases and hooked in with a bespoke backend to help manage orders and print queues. The website was a success, seeing many return customers, and the app facilitated many orders until the business was sadly shuttered for personal reasons.

This project helped me step back and understand the multifaceted benefits of software. The web app had completely different criteria and use cases than the backend tools, but both had to seamlessly work together to support the process from start to finish.

Analytics, hosting, and testing were key areas to get right in a production system to allow us to iterate quickly and safely. I'm proud to say the system supported all its transactions with no major outages or issues. I attribute this to the robustness of the tools we used and the care we took in testing the system in a specific non-production environment.

This is a product I used myself many times and still have the chopping board holder, plant pots, and frog models to prove it.