This week saw some significant milestones across multiple projects and client engagements as we pushed forward on greenfield development, CI/CD pipeline engineering, client website maintenance, and enterprise e-commerce platform work.

The headline delivery on the internal project front was completing the full application scaffold on a bespoke web platform we’ve been building from the ground up — designed to bring a family history narrative to life through interactive cartography, chronological timelines, and a curated media gallery. And it’s a properly engineered foundation, not a quick dotnet new and a prayer. We landed on a .NET 10 LTS / C# 14 stack using a hybrid rendering architecture: Razor Pages own all public-facing routing for SEO-friendly, low-TTFB content delivery, with Blazor Server components embedded as interactive islands via the Component Tag Helper only where rich interactivity is warranted (think Leaflet.js map rendering and gallery lightboxes). The solution follows a strict Onion Architecture across five projects — Domain, Application, Infrastructure, Web, and Tests — enforcing inward-only dependency flow and keeping the domain layer completely decoupled from framework concerns like EF Core and ASP.NET. Nullable reference types are enabled solution-wide, DI composition is centralised in Program.cs, and we’ve got both MapRazorPages() and MapBlazorHub() wired into the middleware pipeline. Bootstrap 5.3 and Leaflet.js are managed via LibMan, Hot Reload is confirmed working across both .cshtml and .razor files, and the test runner is green.

With the scaffold in place, we immediately turned our attention to source control and continuous integration. The Git repository is set up on GitHub, and we’ve configured a full CI pipeline that runs linting, type checking, and the test suite automatically on every pull request — PRs can’t be merged if the pipeline fails. Since branch protection rules aren’t available on the GitHub Free plan for private repos, we’ve taken a convention-based approach, documenting our branching strategy, naming conventions, commit message guidelines, and PR process in a CONTRIBUTING.md that GitHub surfaces automatically when new issues or PRs are opened. Build notifications are wired up for success and failure, so nothing slips through unnoticed. It’s the kind of developer experience investment that pays dividends from day one.

Earlier in the week we completed the infrastructure cost analysis — documenting estimated monthly running costs across compute, managed database, blob storage, CDN, and domain services, including free-tier allowances and amortised annual costs. Knowing your burn rate before you start provisioning resources is just good engineering discipline, and it’s now all baselined.

We also made solid progress on the cloud infrastructure provisioning. The hosting platform has been evaluated and selected — staying within an ecosystem we know well, with a UK South region deployment for low-latency delivery to our target audience. The managed relational database is being provisioned with native spatial data type support (geography / geometry) baked in, which is critical for the geographic query features this application relies on.

On the client engagement side, we delivered a sprint of work on a large-scale e-commerce platform. This included enhancing observability on an integration bridge service by adding structured logging to improve traceability across the ingestion pipeline, investigating and implementing payment provider configuration changes at the global config level, executing a targeted test cycle on a goods-in workflow to verify a bug fix, and resolving deployment blockers to get the latest build successfully promoted to the SIT environment. The kind of unglamorous but critical integration and DevOps work that keeps a high-traffic commerce platform running smoothly.

We also delivered a content update for one of our client websites — updating staff information and role designations to keep the public-facing team page accurate and current. It’s a small change, but maintaining content accuracy for clients is part of the service we provide, and quick turnarounds on these requests keep the relationship strong.

All in all, a seriously productive week: ten items shipped to Done across three projects, two more in active progress, and we delivered across the full spectrum — from clean-architecture greenfield scaffolding and CI/CD pipeline engineering, through enterprise e-commerce integration work, to client-facing content management. The main development project now has a solid codebase, a working CI pipeline, and documented contributor workflows — the next sprint will be all about getting data flowing through the stack and content rendering on the front end.