Case Study
Core contributor on a personalised mobile reading app focused on personal growth and habit formation. Unblocked long-standing tickets and delivered critical user-facing features including the reader theme system.
Overview
Lampstand is a personal growth reading app with curated content, habit tracking, and a premium reading experience. I joined as a full-stack engineer during a critical period — the team had accumulated feature debt that was blocking the release to both the App Store and Play Store.
The constraint
The primary constraint was time: existing tickets had been open for months and the release was behind schedule. The challenge was not just building features, but identifying which work was genuinely blocking the release and moving fast without introducing new regressions.
Highlights
Designed and built the in-app reader theme system — light, dark, and sepia modes with font-size controls. This was one of the long-standing tickets blocking the release and required threading state across the React Native rendering pipeline and persisting preferences to the local device.
Architected the frontend in a shared monorepo with a Storybook component library, cutting estimated development time for new UI features by approximately 30% through standardised, documented UI patterns accessible to the full team.
Embedded session tracking and reading progress analytics into the app, giving the product team measurable engagement data for the first time. This directly informed data-backed decisions about which content formats and features to prioritise post-launch.
Stack
React Native · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Expo · Docker · TypeORM · Express
The app shipped to both the App Store and Play Store. Working within a deadline-driven environment sharpened my ability to triage work effectively — knowing which features are release-critical and which can wait is as important as the building itself.