The Moment I Decided to Tear Down My Own Design
Tearing down your own working code is a specific kind of pain. Version one of MaidsMe worked, two login systems, two dashboards,…
lessons learned
My First Marketplace Design: Two Logins and a Chat in the Middle
My first design for MaidsMe was symmetrical, and the symmetry felt like quality. Two kinds of users, so two of everything, a…
Building a Marketplace for Domestic Workers, and the Weight of It
After the limo plugin, my next build carried a different kind of weight. MaidsMe Pro is a job marketplace for domestic workers…
What Building My Most Ambitious Project Really Taught Me
The limo booking plugin was the most ambitious thing I had built, and the most humbling. A complete ride platform as a…
The Human Touches That Make a Service Real
By this point the limo plugin had its booking flow, its payments, its driver side, and an app like feel. But a…
Achievable Wins: A Booking History and an App-Like Feel
After live tracking humbled me, I wanted wins that would fully land. Two were sitting right there, a booking history so returning…
Live Tracking: The Feature That Looked Easy and Humbled Me
Every ride app has the map, the little car crawling toward the pickup pin, and I wanted it badly for the limo…
Building the Driver Side: Dashboards and Drag-to-Assign
A booking that no driver knows about is just a database row. The other half of a ride platform is dispatch, the…
Adding Card Payments With Stripe, and the Weight of Handling Money
Adding card payments changed how the whole project felt. Every feature before this, a bug meant inconvenience. A payments bug means someone’s…
Adding Phone Verification, and Why the Check Must Live on the Server
A booking system where anyone can type any phone number is a fake-booking machine. Drivers get dispatched to numbers that do not…