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A year and a half of architecture decisions, plugin systems, and shipping an agentic commerce platform with a two-person engineering team.
We landed on a kernel-based, modular design. The kernel holds only data structures, entity management, and tenant management, nothing else. Storefront features, the sales pipeline, and everything customer-facing live in modules next to the kernel. Third-party integrations sit further out still, as plugins built against a contract on top of that kernel.
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Zero to Platform: What Building as Full Stack Engineer Actually Looked Like
A year and a half of architecture decisions, plugin systems, and shipping an agentic commerce platform with a two-person engineering team.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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We rebuilt TechFoundry's website in a week. The brief that mattered most wasn't "make it look good". It was "make ChatGPT and Gemini able to find us".
Buyers ask an AI before they search now. So all 110 pages (26 pages, 80 Aerless™ hardware parts, 4 articles) are server-rendered with real content and structured data a model can cite: Product schema with SKU and MPN on every part, BlogPosting on articles, CreativeWork on case studies, and a robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in.
Three other decisions I'd make again.
1) One hand-coded WordPress theme, three "surfaces": corporate hub, /ai, /aerless. Each gets its own nav, palette and CTAs; the same codebase decides which company you're looking at. No page builder, no front-end framework. Homepage Lighthouse: 98 / 100 / 100 / 100.
2) Leads go where the team already is. Every form posts straight into a Microsoft Teams channel and creates a record in a lightweight CRM I built inside WordPress. Nothing lives only in an inbox.
3) Claude Code and ChatGPT alongside hand-written PHP and JS. That's how one person ships 110 pages in seven days.
What I'd fix on day one next time: reserve space for the animated heroes so mobile doesn't shift layout, and ship an llms.txt next to the sitemap.
If you're rebuilding a site this year: are you designing for AI search yet, or still just Google?
Appreciate the honesty on the mobile layout shift. Are you fixing it with explicit CSS aspect ratios to push that mobile score back above 90?
Finally posting the results of a quick turn-around 0-1 project for a successful electrical commercial contractor, looking to expand into the residential market. The clients were respectful, and trusted me to get them live quickly, while ensuring the site was AEO ready.
As a designer, there are projects that showcase beauty and those that showcase functionality. I feel like we hit the beats to make it personal, functional and am looking forward to add more features and pages to showcase all the work they are capable of.
7okko
A store builder for small Indonesian businesses. The owner answers a short quiz, and 7okko generates a storefront for them: a subdomain, a catalogue, the page sections, and an order flow they can take live the same day. Most of these businesses have no website at all, so the product has to get them from nothing to a working shop without them learning a tool.
What I built
Store generation: an onboarding quiz, a subdomain check, and a first pass at the storefront so nobody starts from an empty page.
A catalogue with AI written product descriptions, image uploads, and scoping per store.
A section editor on the storefront: inline editing, section ordering, and regeneration per section when a draft is not good enough.
Orders, with a public intake path, a status flow and an export for the owner.
Sessions and ownership per store, so one dashboard can hold several shops without leaking data between them.
Stack
Next.js, Hono, Cloudflare Workers, D1, Xendit.
Payments go through Xendit.
