An online balloon shop — built while mentoring two junior developers through it
An online balloon shop — built while mentoring two junior developers through it
An online balloon shop: storefront, cart, checkout, returns following the client’s paperwork, and an admin panel for products and orders. Backend on Express and Drizzle over Postgres, front end on React with Vite, TanStack Query, Radix and Tailwind, media in object storage.
Organic traffic instead of ads
The shop needed free traffic, and search engines see a single-page app as empty. I added server-side rendering with a TTL cache of the produced HTML and route prefetching through the same client data layer — so a crawler gets complete markup while a visitor keeps browsing without reloads.
Then an SEO audit and a blog content generator: it first reads competitors’ pages for the target query and only then writes the text. Otherwise you get an article about nothing in particular, and search results have enough of those already.
Mentoring inside a real project
58% of the 130 commits are mine; the rest came from two students I mentored through this project. For them I set up a separate agent workflow: the agent is not allowed to write more than fifteen lines at a time on the student’s behalf. The reasoning is simple — on full autopilot a person receives working code and gains no understanding, while a cap forces them to read it, place it and explain what it does.
Both stopped committing at the end of January 2026; since then I run the project alone: fixes, refactoring and changes requested by the client.