Clearline

SC Pressure Point ran on text messages and memory — fine at first, unworkable as jobs piled up. Clearline is the fix: a customer relationship manager that keeps jobs, customers, quotes, and schedules in one place instead of across a phone.

It's the most substantial engineering project I've shipped — a deployable product with a backend, not a static page.

I chose a no-framework, vanilla-JS PWA on purpose — fewer moving parts to break, and it's something I fully understand end to end. Firebase Firestore handles the data; GitHub Pages serves the app.

• Firestore as the live backend — jobs, customers, quotes, schedules
• Vanilla JS PWA (no React/Vue) — small, fast, fully owned
• GitHub Pages deploy that regenerates config from secrets on every push
• Access model built on a signed-in accessUids list, plus a backfill tool to grant access to existing records

Shipping it meant solving actual problems, not toy ones:

• Firestore security rules: the jobs list query broke until I set the rule to signedIn() && uid() in accessUids — a get()/owner check made array-contains queries unprovable
• Chasing "permission-denied" errors that were sometimes stale rules, sometimes client bugs — had to pull the full console stack, not just the error text
• Deploy discipline: rules publish manually; the deploy script rebuilds config from secrets each push (one unquoted secret once broke the live site)
• Tradeoffs between simplicity and a clean security model, decided and documented

Clearline is where I learned to think like an engineer instead of a tinkerer: a security model that holds, a deploy that's reproducible, and the discipline to debug at the root instead of patching the symptom. The decisions I'd make differently next time are the most valuable part.