Customer experience
Finding the right puppy
Live puppy and parent listings, breed details, image galleries, contact information, and hosted deposits.
A production system with a personal beginning
A simple puppy website that grew into a complete business platform.
Homestead Puppies began as a small project for my dad’s retirement breeding business. What started as a way to list available puppies became the day-to-day system behind the operation—and my first full-stack production application.
From side project to operational tool
The goal was initially modest: give families a clear place to see available puppies. As the business grew, the website grew with it—adding secure administration, structured records, media handling, deposits, and deployment automation.
Non-technical users could manage the public website without touching the code. That made the project more than a portfolio exercise: it became dependable software serving a real business and real customers.
What the system handles
A complete workflow behind a straightforward customer experience.
Business operations
Managing the catalog
Authenticated tools for puppies, parents, breeds, pricing, availability, and image uploads.
Production platform
Staying reliable
Automated deployment, process recovery, TLS, CDN delivery, database-backed sessions, and hardened hosting.
The stack at a glance
The original interface is server-rendered with EJS. A public API now lets the modern React frontend use the same production data without replacing the working business tools behind it.
- Node.js
- Express
- EJS
- React
- PostgreSQL
- Passport
- AWS S3
- CloudFront
- Nginx
- PM2
- Cloudflare
- GitHub Actions
The migration story
One backend. Two generations of frontend.
Keeping this original site online alongside the React rebuild shows both sides of the work: maintaining a proven system and modernizing it incrementally without interrupting the business it supports.
Continue to the modern experience