STORY
Engineering story
How the platform was scoped, built, and refined.
DevLaunch Systems initially needed a better way to manage basic business administration such as leads, clients, projects, quotes, contracts, and invoices. Using disconnected documents and external tools would have fragmented information across multiple systems and made it harder to connect business development, project delivery, finances, and reporting. As the business began operating, new requirements continued to emerge from the actual workflows being used day to day.
I built a custom CRM around the business process rather than starting with a fixed feature list. The system began with core business administration and evolved incrementally as new workflows became necessary. Leads could become clients and projects, quotes could progress into contracts and invoices, payments and expenses could feed financial records, and later versions expanded into project management, business development, work tracking, analytics, reporting, and reusable engineering infrastructure. This allowed the platform to grow alongside the business instead of requiring a complete rebuild whenever the workflow changed.
Architecture
The CRM uses a layered Next.js architecture with React Server Components and server-side workflows backed by Prisma and Neon PostgreSQL. Business entities are modeled around the relationships between leads, clients, projects, quotes, contracts, invoices, payments, expenses, users, and project memberships. Auth.js provides authentication while application and database authorization controls protect administrative and project-scoped operations. Stripe integrations are handled through persisted application state and webhook-driven workflows. Later development phases introduced reusable UI primitives, centralized design tokens, Storybook documentation, configuration-driven interfaces, stronger testing boundaries, and architectural standards intended to support future developers and continued platform growth.
The largest challenge has been evolving a production system while actively using it to run the business. Requirements were not known upfront because many became visible only after the underlying workflow was used in practice. New capabilities therefore had to coexist with existing data and workflows without destabilizing working features. As the CRM grew, another challenge emerged: functionality was increasing faster than the application's original organization could comfortably support, requiring deliberate codebase restructuring, stronger architectural boundaries, reusable UI patterns, security hardening, and better documentation.
Building around stable business concepts while allowing workflows to evolve has been more valuable than trying to predict every future requirement. The project reinforced the importance of separating business logic from presentation, keeping authorization close to protected resources, using incremental migrations instead of large rewrites, and documenting architectural decisions before knowledge becomes dependent on one developer. It also demonstrated that internal software can become an engineering platform over time when repeated workflows are turned into reusable systems instead of isolated features.
Planned development continues the transition from a founder-built internal application toward a system another developer could safely understand and extend. Current work includes configuration-driven navigation and metadata, reusable form and DataTable patterns, standardized feedback components, stronger developer onboarding, continued authorization and security improvements, AI-assisted business workflows, and further automation between business development, project management, reporting, and engineering processes.
Features
What the product or platform delivers.
- Lead management
- Client management
- Project management
- Quote and proposal management
- Contract workflows
- Invoice management
- Stripe payment integration
- Financial tracking
- Expense management
- Business development tracking
- Job opportunity evaluation
- Proposal tracking
- Work logging
- Weekly business reporting
- PDF report generation
- Project memberships
- Role-based authorization
- Client-facing workflows
- Design system
- Storybook documentation
- Analytics
- Configuration-driven UI
- Automated testing
Responsibilities
What I personally designed, built, or owned.
- Product planning
- Business process analysis
- System architecture
- Database design
- Backend development
- Frontend development
- Authentication
- Authorization architecture
- Security hardening
- Stripe integration
- Reporting architecture
- PDF generation
- Design-system architecture
- Testing
- Accessibility
- CI safeguards
- Deployment
- Technical documentation
- Developer experience
- Architecture planning