Personal Projects
Side projects solving real problems
Problems I've encountered personally or through my network, turned into products with real users. Built during evenings (off-hours) and weekends, each project represents end-to-end ownership: identifying the opportunity, building (or leading) the technical solution, and shipping to production.
The Origin:
A close friend—one of South America's largest e-commerce influencers—shared how cash-on-delivery (COD) payment methods are severely under-supported in Shopify across Latin America. Most countries in the region rely heavily on COD, but Shopify's native support is limited, forcing merchants to use workarounds or lose customers at checkout.
What I Built:
- Assembled and led 9-person engineering team (2 technical leads + 7 rotating developers)
- Architected full-stack Shopify app supporting COD workflows
- Integrated with regional payment processors and logistics providers
- Built merchant dashboard for order management and COD tracking
- Webhook system for real-time order status updates
- Successfully deployed to production serving multiple high-volume merchants
Outcome: Three major e-commerce influencers partnered to acquire the application for $30,000+ USD in December 2024.
My Role: Technical leadership, architecture decisions, team coordination, development oversight, client communication, and product delivery.
Event Management Platform for Brazilian Entertainment Industry
$ Led 4 peopleThe Problem I Witnessed:
During COVID-19, I watched friends in Rio's entertainment industry shut down operations. The crisis revealed systemic technology gaps: manual processes, poor communication, and platforms that couldn't handle high-end event requirements in Brazil. Most critically, producers only knew if events were profitable days after they ended.
What I Built:
For Consumers:
- Curated event discovery (AI-powered scraping filters quality events)
- Clean interface replacing generic ticket platform chaos
- Event management dashboard with AI assistance
- VIP/special guest list tracking and coordination
- Real-time analytics during events (not days later)
- Customer LTV tracking across multiple events
- Instant profitability visibility
- Multi-role access (producers, promoters, operations staff)
Current Status: Delivered to event agency in Rio de Janeiro. 54 team members enrolled, pending production rollout as they transition from legacy systems.
The Problem (My Own):
I had 47 browser tabs open. Notion nested 5 levels deep. Trello, Cold Turkey, RescueTime, Momentum, multiple calendar apps... I was managing my productivity system more than doing actual work. Context-switching between 8 apps to check what I should be doing wasn't optimization—it was theater.
What I Built:
Led a 2-person team to build one Chrome extension that replaced my entire productivity stack:
- Distraction blocking while working
- Goal and task tracking
- Integrated calendar view
- World clock for distributed team coordination
- AI goal-alignment checker: Analyzes if daily work actually moves you toward stated goals
The AI component is the key differentiator—it's honest, sometimes uncomfortable, but it works. It tells you when you're busy but not productive.
Current Status: 83 active users on free tier, published on Chrome Web Store with freemium model. Learning about user acquisition for developer tools.