No separate backend

Next.js and Payload v3 run inside a single application: the administrative panel opens at /admin, while the public pages and the API share the same routes, so there is simply no separate backend here. The data is kept in PostgreSQL, with the Russian and English versions living at field level rather than split across different pages. Images are processed by sharp and rebuilt into the sizes they need, while the public pages are served statically, following an SSG and ISR scheme, and therefore open instantly.

Design built from a reference

Before taking up the interface itself, I assembled a separate reference layout showing every state of every component at once. The values in the code are taken from there rather than chosen by eye: the design tokens are CSS variables carrying the same names as on the layout, described for two themes, dark and light. Where the contrast fell below the WCAG AA level, I raised the text colours. The catalog grid is arranged as a bento of two tile sizes - 263×192 for ordinary entries and 546×404 for previews, on a twenty pixel step - and the larger tiles are set along a diagonal so that the rows never look alike.

Quality and the server

The unit tests are written with Vitest and the end-to-end tests with Playwright, and the latter run against an already built production version rather than a development server; accessibility is checked with axe. Before every commit both lint and build must run and both must come back green. Locally the database runs in Docker and the schema is raised from committed migrations. On the server it all lives as a single service on Coolify, hosted at netcup, under its own domain, netroom.dev.

Built with Claude

The design, the frontend, the backend and the infrastructure I built together with Claude - from the earliest decisions about architecture and design tokens through to the tests and the deployment. But this is not "generate and forget": the architectural decisions, the quality of the code and the discipline of the checks before each commit remain mine. Artificial intelligence speeds the work up here; it does not make decisions in my place.