Note: I did sign an official non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for my work on this product, so at this time, I'm not able to provide any photos or expand beyond the technical details I mention on this page.

A small community of developers and entrepreneurs knew about my work through my technology tutorials blog CodeNebula. Because I wrote a few in-depth tutorials on how to use the payment processor Stripe, one such entrepreneur reached out to me through CodeNebula and asked if I'd be willing to help them integrate Stripe into their marketplace application.

When they first reached out to me, I was in the midst of heavy feature work for ProfitKit. But I wanted to help them, especially because I learned we were both members of a small, close-knit online entrepreneurial community.

During my entrepreneurial journey, I've often felt alone and wished for more help — so I deeply believe in helping others as much as I possibly can. Even I can't do everything the other person wishes for, I believe that just guiding or bouncing ideas off of the other person can go a long ways.

So I jumped on a call and did some lightweight technical consulting for them to point them in the right direction (breaking down which Stripe services to use, walking them through different e-commerce workflows would look like, etc.). We kept in contact over email for the next few months, and eventually when the heavy feature work died down, I decided to help them out part-time. We entered into a formal technical consulting agreement, and I was able to explore the technologies deeper and do some initial hands-on work for the product.

• I was one of two people working directly on the product, with the other person being the founder of the application

We were both in different locations, so we did communicate remotely using email, Notion, Trello, Loom, and Zoom/Google Meet.

I wore the following hats while working on this product:

• General Technical Consultant — I'd consult with my client weekly on how to integrate e-commerce workflows into their marketplace application. I also researched several headless e-commerce CMS service and automatic sales tax calculation solutions (before Stripe came out with Stripe Tax).

• Stripe Consultant — I completely architected and documented onboarding, cart, checkout, and Stripe Payment Intent state workflows with Stripe Express. I helped my client understand Stripe terminology in less technical terms and answered many Stripe-related questions.

• Full-Stack Developer — I single-handedly created proof-of-concept solutions for getting data in and out of app builder via API calls, automated scripts, and the app builder’s iframe and webhook features.

• Software Architect — I brainstormed ideas on how to improve performance and scale up the application in tandem with the external app builder to support a product environment with hundreds to thousands of users. I'm excited and proud to share that I was able to reduce the average data query speed by 2.5x through use of a custom, layered technique.

• Stripe API

• Google APIs

• GraphQL

• Node.js

• React.js

• & more (cannot disclose at this time)