The full stories behindthe systems I've shipped.

The pain point

The shop ran on spreadsheets, a shared inbox, and a whiteboard. Quotes were typed twice, deposits were chased from memory, and proof approvals were buried in email threads where nobody could tell which version the customer had actually signed off on.

What I built

1. One pipeline, nine stages. Every job runs from walk-in to done with automatic stage history, due-date urgency, and a stale flag on anything left sitting in one stage for four days.
2. Counter intake in three steps. Live customer search, several job types on a single job, and itemised quoting with fractional quantities, so a walk-in is quoted and booked in minutes.
3. Proofs and payments in one flow. Versioned design proofs carry a shared staff and customer thread. Card deposits and balances drive the same state machine as the cash path, so a shop with no payment processor configured still works.
4. Numbers the owner can trust. Invoices are generated live from the job current quote lines and payment state, and an owner-only view shows revenue, material cost, and profit per job. Material costs are snapshotted at the time of use, so later price changes never rewrite what a finished job cost.

Decisions worth calling out

1. Customers never create an account. Every customer touchpoint is a tokenised link, so quoting, proofing, and approval work with no signup and no password to reset.
2. The quote locks once the deposit is paid. Nobody can quietly alter what the customer agreed to, so the invoice always matches the approved lines.
3. Payments survive a dropped webhook. Webhook driven with a short poll as a backstop, so a paid job never sits showing unpaid. Mismatched amounts are flagged for a human rather than applied automatically.
4. Tests run against a real database. The suite migrates an in-memory D1 from the actual migration files instead of mocking it, so schema drift shows up as a failing test.

The pain point

APR Solutions were running on outdated software with a poor UI that frustrated technicians daily. Task visibility was limited, tracking materials was a manual afterthought, and there was no way to measure or reward individual technician output.

How I solved it

1. Personal technician accounts. Every tech logs in to see their assigned tasks, update statuses, and track their own progress with no shared terminals and no confusion.
2. Points per task. Technicians earn reward points as they move tasks through statuses, giving managers a live performance signal and giving techs a reason to keep the system updated.
3. Built-in materials requests. When materials are missing, techs raise a request directly in the system. Requests are batched and sent to sales automatically each week by email and surfaced on the management dashboard.

The pain point

Selling hosting by hand doesn't scale: every order meant someone noticing the payment, setting up the server manually, and emailing credentials back. Customers waited, and billing lived in a different place from the servers it was supposed to control.

How I solved it

1. Stripe-powered automatic billing. Payments, renewals, invoicing, and suspensions all run through Stripe without anyone touching an order. Clients are billed on a recurring subscription, not a one-off.
2. Payment triggers provisioning. A successful charge spins up the server automatically. The client gets access without any manual step in between.
3. Loyalty system with real rewards. As clients accumulate spend, they unlock Discord roles and percentage discounts off their subscriptions. Tiers are calculated automatically from Stripe billing history.