CandleMe — Interactive Digital Participation & Engagement Platform

CandleMe is a large-scale interactive digital platform designed to connect physical experiences, digital participation, organizations, communities, and persistent user journeys through a unified web experience.

I contributed to the product as a full-stack engineer, working across an established production codebase and handling functionality that extended far beyond traditional web application development. My work included complex frontend interactions, application-state integration, backend-connected user flows, organization configuration, QR/direct-link experiences, and performance-sensitive real-time graphics using Three.js and PixiJS.

One of the defining parts of CandleMe is its interactive candle experience. Rather than functioning as a conventional website, the platform combines application logic with rich visual rendering to create dynamic experiences that respond to real product state and user interaction.

The candle and flame systems were built as functional parts of the application—not simply decorative animations. They had to integrate correctly with surrounding UI, application state, configuration, navigation, and the broader product journey while maintaining smooth performance across different browsers and devices.

Core Product & Engineering Areas

Interactive Candle Experience

The product includes highly interactive visual experiences powered by Three.js and PixiJS, with custom flame effects and graphical behavior integrated directly into real application workflows.

This required balancing visual quality with browser performance, device compatibility, responsive behavior, and application-state synchronization.

Production Graphics & Performance Optimization

Real-time graphics introduce a completely different set of engineering challenges compared with standard frontend development.

I worked on optimizing the rendering experience across devices, including testing flame effects at approximately 45–60 FPS on a Galaxy A24 and a stable 60 FPS on an iPhone 15, while also validating compatibility with Apple/Metal-based rendering environments.

This involved careful attention to rendering behavior, visual consistency, performance, and differences between local and deployed environments.

QR & Direct-Link Entry

CandleMe supports experiences that can begin through a QR scan or direct link, creating a bridge between physical locations and the digital application.

Users can enter the relevant CandleMe experience without navigating through a traditional application onboarding flow, making the system suitable for physical venues, activations, events, and distributed experiences.

Persistent Candle Experiences

A candle can represent more than a single interaction. The product is structured around persistent digital experiences that users can revisit, interact with, and share.

This required product flows that maintain the relationship between the candle, its configuration, its destination, and the environment in which it is being used.

Configurable Destinations & “Doors”

The platform supports configurable destinations or Doors, allowing CandleMe experiences to direct users into different journeys depending on the organization, location, campaign, or use case.

This adds an important configuration layer to the product because different deployments can use the same underlying platform while presenting different experiences to users.

Organization Ownership & Management

CandleMe includes organization-level functionality that allows experiences to be created and controlled within a larger operational structure.

The system needed to support ownership, organization configuration, locations, plans, activations, and the relationships between these entities rather than treating every candle as an isolated object.

Locations & Physical Environments

The product is designed to operate across real-world environments.

Candle experiences can be associated with physical locations and organizational contexts, allowing the digital platform to extend into venues, events, communities, hospitality environments, campuses, wellness spaces, and other physical settings.

Activations

Organizations can configure and manage activations around specific CandleMe experiences.

This introduces another layer of application state and business logic involving where an experience is deployed, how users enter it, what configuration is active, and which organization owns or manages it.

Responsive Cross-Device Experience

The product needed to work effectively across desktop and mobile environments because many users enter the experience directly from their phones after scanning a QR code.

The visual rendering layer, UI components, and application interactions therefore had to remain responsive and usable across very different viewport sizes and hardware capabilities.

Integration With an Existing Production Application

A major part of the engineering challenge was working within a large existing PHP-based frontend/backend application rather than building an isolated prototype.

New interactive functionality needed to integrate with existing business logic, state management, navigation, backend-driven configuration, and production user flows without disrupting established behavior.

That required understanding the existing architecture first and then introducing new functionality in a way that remained maintainable and compatible with the rest of the system.

Technical Complexity

CandleMe demonstrates a combination of several engineering disciplines:

Full-stack product engineering for the wider web application and business workflows.

Creative frontend engineering for highly customized interactive experiences.

Three.js / WebGL-style rendering for browser-based visual effects.

PixiJS integration for performant interactive graphics.

Backend integration with a mature PHP application.

Performance engineering across mobile and desktop hardware.

Responsive application development for QR-first mobile user journeys.

Configuration-driven architecture supporting organizations, locations, activations, destinations, and reusable experiences.

The project required thinking beyond individual pages or API endpoints. Features had to work together as part of a larger production ecosystem where the visual experience, backend configuration, organization structure, and user journey were tightly connected.

Result

The result is a production platform that combines interactive web graphics, physical-to-digital experiences, organization management, configurable user journeys, responsive UX, and full-stack application engineering within a single product.

For me, CandleMe represents the type of engineering work where frontend, backend, architecture, performance, and product thinking overlap—requiring both the ability to build technically complex functionality and the judgment to integrate it safely into an existing production system.