Delivery & Cloud/2020 — Present
Support Pay
Platform for managing child support, alimony and shared child expenses
- Role
- Full-Stack Lead / Architect (FE & BE)
- Year
- 2020 — Present
- Discipline
- Delivery & Cloud
- Stack
- 11 technologies
A long-running web platform that consolidates child support, alimony and every shared child expense — medical, education, childcare — into one place. I have architected and led both front end and back end since 2020.
01The problem
Separated parents track shared expenses across receipts, messages and spreadsheets, then argue about them. The domain is unusually unforgiving: these are legally significant amounts between people who by definition do not trust each other's arithmetic, so the record has to be unambiguous.
02The approach
A Next.js and TypeScript front end using Ant Design and Styled Components, with Unstated Next for state. The back end is Hasura and GraphQL alongside Node/Express and NestJS services over PostgreSQL, containerised with Docker and hosted on AWS EC2. I later drove a complete overhaul of the expense management system to meet new client specifications.
03The outcome
The overhaul delivered a 40% improvement in system efficiency. The earlier build cut expense processing time by 20% and lifted user efficiency by 15%. Five full-stack engineers reported to me on the overhaul.
04Decisions worth noting
- 01
Hasura over PostgreSQL for the GraphQL layer, with Node/Express and NestJS services where the logic outgrew generated resolvers.
- 02
Complete overhaul of the expense management system to align with revised client specifications, rather than patching the original.
- 03
Owned architecture across both front end and back end, so the API shape and the UI needs were decided together.
- 04
Dockerised and deployed to AWS EC2.