Work

Arrivalio is my capstone. It helps newcomers get through their first months in Canada with a step-by-step plan: SIN number, bank account, healthcare, housing.

The project started from research into what newcomers actually struggle with. The information is not missing. Government sites, settlement guides and community resources all have it, but it sits in different places and lands on you all at once. For someone who just arrived that is overwhelming.

So I did not add more information, I organised what already exists. Mobile first, because that is where people open these resources. Scattered tasks became one checklist with clear priorities and a sensible order, so it answers what to do first, not only what to do.

Usability testing kept changing the build. The biggest decision came out of it: I had planned a flexible system, and testing showed that too much freedom made things harder. People wanted to be told what came first. It became a guided checklist with task dependencies.

AI tools were part of this project. Figma Make for early layouts, Claude and ChatGPT for debugging and problem solving.

The original dashboard put everything on one page with no visual hierarchy, so pulling out a single number meant reading past dozens of charts that had nothing to do with you.

We catalogued every data point it showed, then wrote personas to work out who actually opens it. The primary one turned out to be a Vancouver resident checking a local transit, housing or environmental figure, not a data analyst.

That made the main decision obvious and uncomfortable: our persona did not need most of what was on the page. We cut roughly two thirds of the charts and rebuilt the rest around a cleaner sidebar, fewer and more readable graphs, and a path from summary to detail.

A school project built with a classmate, splitting the design and development work. No AI tools were used on this one.

Twin V Studio needed a landing page that read as brutal-editorial, not another SaaS template: full-bleed layout with no centred container, and a palette that mostly stays quiet. Canvas, paper and carbon carry the page; mint and voltage are kept for accents only.

The page moves through three zones, light, dark, light, and the transition between them is a rounded card that grows into a full-screen section as you scroll. I built that as a reusable ScrollPanel component on GSAP's ScrollTrigger, backed by one set of role-based colour tokens that resolve correctly in whichever zone they land.

The hero runs morphing SVG blobs behind an all-caps Anton headline, and the whole page scrolls through GSAP's ScrollSmoother rather than native scroll, which meant getting fixed elements like the nav to behave against a smoothed viewport. I also check tab visibility before triggering animations, so GSAP doesn't keep animating, and eventually freeze, content sitting in a background tab.

Next.js 16 on Turbopack, React 19 and Tailwind v4 carry the front end; a small FastAPI service handles the brief form and sends it over the Gmail API.

A three-person cleaning business in Kokshetau, Kazakhstan ran on a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp thread and the owner's memory. Prices lived in one person's head, so an administrator who needed a quote at 9am waited for him to be free. Nobody could say what a customer had paid last spring, which technician had been to their apartment, or how many enquiries never became jobs.

The owner opens the system twice a week. The administrator opens it forty times a day, from her phone, often away from the office. Every screen was measured at 390 points before it was measured wide, and no field is required that doesn't come up in a real phone call with a customer.

A closed order stores the price it was sold at, not a pointer to today's price list, so the owner can raise rates on Monday without changing what last month's jobs earned. Balances and payment status are computed from payment records, never stored as a field, so the number on screen always equals the rows beneath it. Money is integers throughout, no floating point anywhere in the calculation or the database.

Built for a real business, my brother's, and unpaid: I'm calling it commissioned rather than client work because that's the honest word for it. In production since September 2026; first month of real use in progress.