Problem
A civic Restaurant Week needed a production engagement surface — punch cards, anti-fraud check-ins, real-time competition, and restaurant admin — on a hard calendar deadline with a single engineer.
Approach
Ship an MVP PWA focused on QR stamps, geofence validation, role-based auth, raffle mechanics, and admin dashboards. Instrument analytics for ops and growth from week one.
Decisions
- Time-limited QR tokens, RLS isolation, and per-restaurant daily stamp limits to deter screenshot fraud without killing signup friction (documented in career case-study memo).
- PostgreSQL materialized views (30s refresh) plus caching for leaderboard hot paths under concurrent check-ins.
- Clerk for auth; Supabase for realtime data; PostHog for product/ops visibility.
Outcome
Week-one (core-resume.md): 3,557 unique visitors, 12,217 page views, 635 new users, 399 completed punch cards. Grew to 6,066 unique visitors (+445% above projections), 21,744 page views, 1,055 verified sign-ups, and 1.2M requests — 99.99% uptime, zero security incidents. Sub-200ms QR validation under 100+ concurrent users; adopted as reusable City of Maple Grove civic infrastructure.
What I'd do differently
Would extract a reusable civic-event kit (stamp rules, raffle, venue admin) sooner — the next city event should not rebuild the fraud and leaderboard layers from scratch.