02 Case studies
Five builds, five different problems — a regulated two-sided marketplace with a next-generation iOS app and attorney web dashboard, a one-of-a-kind drag-and-drop audio mastering app, an artist's booking platform, an editorial commerce system, and a photography portfolio with its own admin tooling. Same studio, same standard.
Next-generation iOS app · Attorney web dashboard
A two-sided legal marketplace. People describe their situation and post a case; bar-verified attorneys apply with an offer, and the client chooses who to hire. Free for both sides.
The product now runs on two surfaces. A next-generation iOS app on the App Store carries the marketplace itself — posting, applying, offers, and hires. Alongside it, a web dashboard gives attorneys a signed-in practice console: live practice analytics, reusable offer templates and per-case checklists, an exportable archive of every offer sent, a provenance record for every matter won, a publishable directory profile, and Pro subscription billing through hosted Stripe checkout — all behind a password-plus-emailed-code sign-in.
The studio built all of it: the React Native client, the Rails 8 API, the attorney web dashboard, the admin operations panel, automated bar-license verification, push and email pipelines, an attorney outreach system, and a state-by-state rollout — along with the brand, now federally trademark-filed.
One of its kind — drag, drop, master
A one-of-a-kind drag-and-drop mastering app. Drop a WAV onto the grid, pick a loudness target — Spotify, Apple Music, or club — and collect a release-ready 24-bit master. No plugins, no DAW, no mastering engineer: the whole chain runs server-side in a single pass, and the file comes back ready for distribution.
Under the arcade shell — a Tron light-grid, a CRT boot sequence, and a combo HUD that scores each stage as it lands — is a mastering engine the studio wrote from scratch and tuned for EDM and bass-forward music: multiband compression, EQ, de-essing, mono-locked sub with widened highs, saturation, transient shaping, parallel compression, soft clipping, and a true-peak limiter, metered to ITU-R BS.1770-4 and EBU R128 and streamed through ffmpeg at constant memory.
Billing is Stripe Checkout — one song at a time or a monthly Power-Up — with card data that never touches the server, purchases granted exactly once, and automatic refunds when a run fails. Accounts, self-service profiles, and an owner admin booth round it out.
Artist platform for a Denver DJ and producer: bio and catalog, a press kit built for media and booking outreach, and a services page with priced packages feeding a quote pipeline.
The engineering is deliberately minimal and hard to abuse — a single-file Ruby server with a content-security policy computed from its own pages, server-side package pricing that can't be spoofed, honeypots and rate limits on every form, and visitor reporting with zero cookies and zero third-party scripts.
A commerce system for a luxury-streetwear concept: storefront with a featured collection, category-filtered shop, session cart, and guest checkout — plus a full admin back office with inventory, order management, and time-boxed discounts.
The design system is the point: strict monochrome, editorial typography, and a restraint most storefronts don't attempt. Built end to end on Rails with Hotwire.
Client-editable — photos, films, and copy
A photography portfolio for a working photographer: a splash intro that sails the name in and hands off to the galleries, a masonry grid of stills with a lightbox, a motion page of reels and short films that preview on hover, and about and contact pages. Color-heavy, high-resolution work stands entirely on its own against a stark black-and-white shell.
Shania runs it herself. Behind a password and an emailed one-time code, an admin panel lets her upload photographs and films, reorder them by dragging, and rewrite the site's own words — the tagline, the about and contact copy, the footer line, even the message on the 404 page. None of it needs a developer, a deploy, or a line of code.
Two applications share one dyno and one bundle: the hand-written Rack site, in the same minimal, hard-to-abuse pattern as the studio's other builds, and a Rails 8.1 admin app behind it. The public pages are templates on disk with marked-off regions; the server splices the current database rows into them on the way out and never writes the files back. Three indexed queries per request tell it whether anything changed — which is also how a video transcoded in a separate forked worker process reaches the site with no message passing between the two. Photographs run through libvips: sRGB, EXIF and GPS stripped, responsive WebP with a JPEG fallback, never upscaled. Clips run through ffmpeg for a web copy, a muted hover preview, and a poster frame. The content-security policy is recomputed from the site's own markup every time the content changes.
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