Airtable as Backend

I took on a project with a fixed launch date: a one-time event site with registration, info, and a hub element. They needed someone to build out all the backend functionality: APIs, auth, and the connection between the frontend and their data. The client was already familiar with Airtable and wanted to use it as the data layer.

I started with Airtable itself. I designed the full base from scratch: tables, linked records, field types, the whole schema. On top of that, server-side APIs behind session auth and middleware, so the frontend never touched the data directly and every request was gated. A single field-map translated between Airtable's column names and the domain model, which turned out to matter a lot: the client kept changing their mind about what fields they needed, and adding or removing one became a one-line change instead of a hunt through the codebase. On the frontend side, I wrote all the composables that consumed those APIs and wired them into the static site, so the data flow from Airtable to the rendered page was end-to-end mine.

I'm a full-stack engineer, and that means the unglamorous parts too: setting up a client's database by hand, wiring auth middleware into a site that'll be taken down in a month, checking ownership on every mutation for an event that happens once. All of it's the job.