Draft Slot

The original version was two repos, both dated early 2019. The API was Laravel 6 with Lighthouse GraphQL and Passport for OAuth. The frontend was React 16 with Apollo Client for data and Redux for local UI state, bundled with a hand-rolled Webpack config.

I picked every piece for a reason: GraphQL was new, Apollo was new, and picking them meant I'd learn them. That was the entire point of a thesis project.

• Laravel 6 + Lighthouse GraphQL on the backend
• React 16 + Apollo + Redux on the frontend
• Laravel Passport for OAuth2
• Hand-rolled Webpack config — no create-react-app
• Minimal tests, no deployment pipeline, no users

It delivered the thesis. It did not deliver a product. I submitted the work, graduated, and the repos went quiet for almost two years.

When I came back to it, I didn't port the old code. I rebuilt the whole thing in a single Laravel monolith with Blade templates, Alpine.js for interactivity, and Tailwind for styling. The GraphQL layer was gone. The SPA was gone.

The choice looked unfashionable on paper. In practice, it was the only one that made sense. I had no team, no budget, no investors, and a full-time job. Every hour I spent tuning a bundler or fighting hydration was an hour I wasn't spending on features my users could actually see.

• Laravel + Blade for server-rendered HTML, no hydration tax
• Alpine.js progressively enhances specific components
• Tailwind keeps CSS out of the critical path
• One repo, one deploy, one mental model

This was the version that actually shipped. Real users, a real database, a real draft night — the baseline the rest of this story is built on top of. The tradeoff was real too: I gave up some of the polish a full SPA offers. What I got back was velocity. Shipping something on a Sunday night became normal again.

The Reset shipped, but it couldn't carry the problem. It was single-sport. There was no real-time board. The infrastructure didn't match a traffic curve that spikes four nights a year. So I rebuilt the live app's frontend and backend — the product never restarted; the codebase did.

What changed most was the process. Every change ran the same path — requirements first, build, validation before merge — over and over, until the single-sport baseline had become a multi-sport, real-time product that scales.

• Tests before code — the spec came first, the suite grew with every feature, and validation gated every merge
• One Laravel app, modular inside — contract-bounded internal modules with clear API contracts, each carrying its own test coverage
• Infrastructure that follows the calendar — the migration to Laravel Vapor produced three seasonal scaling profiles (offseason, pre-draft, draft week)
• An interface of modular components built in atomic fashion (Atomic Design), each one run through requirements to validated build

The loop itself was agentic — the Laravel codebase is 100% built with Claude, held to the same bar. That practice is its own story; this one is about what it produced: a codebase that hasn't missed a draft night since the rebuild.

The board is the product, so the board got the design attention. Building a prediction is direct manipulation, not form-filling — and the same interactions had to survive the trip from a wide desktop grid to a phone.

• Drag a player or a team straight onto a grid slot — the core action is a drop, not a dropdown
• The grid cards themselves move — rearranging picks works the way you'd shuffle cards on a desk
• CSS anchor positioning pins the clear-and-move controls to the selection they act on
• On mobile the grid reflows into linear sliders — the layout changes, the interactions don't

Keeping the interaction model intact across breakpoints cost more than a simplified mobile view would have. It was the right bill to pay: draft night traffic is heavily mobile, and the product is the feel of making a pick.