§ 01
The brief
one engineer
whole frontend
The client wanted to sell courses and practice sessions online: a marketplace where students browse and book, instructors manage schedules, and content — video, audio, documents — stays protected. There was no frontend codebase, no design system, and no team to coordinate with: the deal was one engineer who owns the surface entirely and ships it live.
That shape is the point of this brief. It's the cheapest way to buy an MVP — no coordination tax, no handoffs — if the one engineer can actually carry marketplace, admin, infrastructure and data migration alone.
§ 02
The constraint
a tight window
no API on legacy
Two things made the window tight. First, the legacy service holding existing courses and user data had no API — the data had to come out some other way. Second, “live” meant live: real booking flows, secure media access, and an admin panel instructors would actually use, not a demo.
§ 03
What shipped
six workstreams
in five months
-
Course marketplace & student profiles
Catalogue, course pages, student accounts and learning progress — the storefront of the platform, built on Next.js with React Query and Zod-validated forms.
-
Booking & scheduling with auto-generated calls
Practice-session booking against instructor schedules, with video-call links generated automatically on confirmation — no manual coordination step left in the flow.
-
Instructor admin panel
Schedule and session management plus learning-progress visualization with Recharts — the tool the client's instructors run their day in.
-
Secure media viewer
Video, audio, PDF and DOC course content served from AWS S3 behind access control — paid content stays paid.
-
BFF layer, CI/CD and deploys
A backend-for-frontend in Next.js to orchestrate APIs, GitLab CI/CD and Docker-based deployment — set up from scratch so shipping was routine, not an event.
-
Legacy data migration — without an API
Automated the migration from the legacy service with Playwright scraping where no API existed — existing courses and data arrived in the new platform without manual re-entry.
§ 04
Outcomes
what moved
5mo
from empty repository to live MVP.
Build window
1
engineer owning the entire frontend, end to end.
Solo build
6
product surfaces shipped: marketplace, profiles, booking, scheduling, progress, secure media.
Scope
0
APIs on the legacy service — migration automated with Playwright scraping.
Data migration
§ 05
Stack & shape
Feb — Aug 2025
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- shadcn/ui
- React Query
- React Hook Form
- Zod
- Strapi
- GitLab CI/CD
- Docker
- Playwright
- AWS S3
Sole frontend engineer — product surfaces, BFF, infrastructure and data migration, owned end to end.
Printer's note
This is what the MVP build-out engagement on the homepage looks like in practice. Smart Online Institute is a client product, so this page describes scope and record rather than internals — I'm happy to walk through the how in a conversation.