2019 · Solo build, then team lead
E-commerce Platform Rebuild · electronicfirst.com
Solo-rebuilt electronicfirst.com from WordPress to Laravel in 2019. Ran WordPress in parallel for ~1 year during the migration. Today I lead the team that maintains and extends it.
Context
electronicfirst.com, a digital-goods e-commerce business, was running on WordPress in 2019. The platform had outgrown it: custom business logic was being shoehorned into plugins, performance was poor, and adding new features meant fighting WordPress instead of extending it.
Problem
- WordPress wasn't built for the kind of e-commerce + digital-licensing flow needed
- Every new feature required either a custom plugin or theme hack
- No clean separation between content and business logic
- Couldn't run a real test suite, couldn't ship cleanly
What I built
A full Laravel rebuild. Solo. Migrated incrementally.
Approach
- Parallel run: kept WordPress live for ~1 year while Laravel grew. Routed traffic feature-by-feature.
- Rewrote business logic in proper services, not plugins
- Today's stack has evolved: Laravel + NestJS for backend services, Next.js for the customer-facing frontend, Blade still around as legacy
Stack
- Laravel (primary)
- NestJS (newer services)
- Next.js (frontend)
- Blade templates (legacy paths)
- MySQL on AWS RDS
Outcome
The platform runs on this stack today. After the cutover I built and now lead the engineering team that maintains and extends it. The Go microservices listed elsewhere on this page (Merchant Center Feeds, Provider Price Sync, Product Feeds Generator) all plug into this platform.