SWAPP is a workflow management and accounting application built for Romanian freelancers and small-business owners, enabling them to keep track of customers, contracts, projects, work effort, invoices and check-register entries. It also produces "real-time" accounting and financial reports.

Our small team of two people built the entire platform and website "from scratch" over 7 months - from hand-drawn UX/UI concepts, through Figma artboards, countless lines of code, to production deployment on a custom VPS.

The universally-rendered React/Next.js application code is written in Typescript and styled with SCSS modules. We're using Next-Auth to manage the user authentication workflow and Prisma with PostgreSQL for data persistence. Most of our business logic is handled within Next.js API routes and we've also used some advanced PL/pgSQL functions to be able to quickly generate "real-time" reports data. The UI is built on top of a slightly customized version of Ant Design - the most complete framework of UI components for React to date, perfectly suited for high-productivity desktop interfaces with heavy data density.

Our users' invoice documents are generated on-the-fly using a fantastic library called ReactPDF.

We've built a custom (bash-scripts based) scenario to reliably manage our production-deployment workflow, and be able to operate a low-cost production environment on a couple of Docker containers residing on an Ubuntu Server VPS.

We've using Paylike (by LUNAR) to accept online payments from our users, and since our application was custom-built, we've rolled our own integration using their Web SDK APIs.

Redesigning and rebuilding from scratch the entire third version of the codebase and managing the PaaS infrastructure of one of the best automobile marketplaces in Romania.

Technology key-points:

• ES6/7 on both the server and client-side;
• Server application built with Express.js/Node.js, running on a custom-built PaaS infrastructure hosted on ArubaCloud;
• Data persistence layer built with Bookshelf.js/Knex.js on top of PostgreSQL, with a custom-made FTS engine to fully support Romanian language;
• Data caching on a dedicated Redis server;
• Views built with Jade and styled with Stylus;
• BLOB storage on Amazon AWS;
• PWA elements built with VanillaJS/DOMTastic/Riot.js, without jQuery.

Exposure Recruitment was a Dublin-based recruitment agency whose aim is to "make great things happen" by helping quality businesses and professionals find each other in the global market.

Our extensive "hands-on" technical background enabled us to do things a bit differently than the usual recruitment agencies. We "knew people" but we also knew technology.