Casa Mia / Product & Full-stack / 2025
Lead AI Architect Communication at Casa Mia lived across WhatsApp, paper notes, and generic email — parents were anxious, teachers repeated the same answers, and nothing felt secure. I designed and built a single platform: a public marketing site plus admin, teacher, and parent portals with strict data boundaries.
The visual system started in Figma with Lexend typography, light/dark tokens, and role-based flows — then shipped as a production Next.js app on Netlify with Supabase at the core.
I mapped three roles first — what admins, teachers, and parents actually need — then designed flows before pixels. Figma variables became Tailwind config; Next.js App Router handled SSR for SEO on public pages and interactive portals behind middleware.
Security wasn't an afterthought: PostgreSQL Row Level Security ensures parents only see their child's photos, messages, and reports — regardless of which API endpoint is called.
The platform is live at a real Montessori preschool. Scattered chats became a structured system; manual spreadsheets became attendance reports; insecure photo sharing became tagged galleries with signed URLs.
The hardest call was enforcing access at the database layer, not just in Next.js middleware. Middleware protects routes, but RLS guarantees that even a misconfigured endpoint cannot leak another family's data. That choice added upfront complexity and paid off in trust.
Casa Mia changed how I think about design — it's not just screens, it's how systems reduce stress for real people. Shipping solo in two weeks meant ruthless scope: one platform, three roles, one source of truth.
Adopting RRule for recurring school events pushed my date-handling skills. Building the calendar to interpret iCalendar rules client-side was the trickiest integration — and the most satisfying when it worked.
Good UX here isn't fewer clicks — it's fewer worried messages at pickup. Every feature was judged by whether it made parents calmer or teachers faster.