JO Academy

Brow education platform, course sales, progress tracking, product store.

Role: Full Stack
Year: 2024
Category: Education
Stack: ReactNodeStripeMongoDB

02 · Outcomes

What the build actually shipped.

Numbers, not adjectives. The stats below are pulled from production. Anything still live, still measured.

2024

shipping next

education

End-to-end

front + back

one set of hands

tech in stack

React · Node

2024

shipped

year of build

03 · Overview

What it does.

Brow education platform, course sales, progress tracking, product store.

05 · Process

How the build actually ran.

Four phases. Each one with a deliverable the client could see, not a slide deck of intent.

01
Conversation
Mapped the audience, the core flows, the constraints. Stack picks came after the user story — they followed what the product had to do, not the other way around.
02
Plan
Schema-first. Data flow, service boundaries, what gets cached and where. The boring decisions made on purpose so the build above them stays honest.
03
Build
Frontend, backend, deployment, the operational pages. Honest weekly demos, no Tuesday-before-launch heroics, no hidden scope.
04
Ship & Maintain
Store / web release cycles, monitoring, analytics, the dull work that decides whether a launch survives 48 hours. Documented handover.

06 · Decisions

The choices that shaped the build.

Tech is downstream of decisions. These are the calls made early enough to compound the right way. The ones a code review six months later still agrees with.

End-to-end ownership

One engineer from schema to deploy. Removes the most expensive failure mode in product builds — the seam between specs and code where intent dies.

Schema before UI

Data shapes first, screens second. The frontend is a view of the data, not a parallel reality. Saves weeks of rework when scope shifts.

Boring tech where it matters

Relational stores for payments and ledgers (ACID is non-negotiable), document stores for content, Redis for cache. Pick the dull tool for the dull job.