Yard To Table

Project context

Yard To Table is a full-stack application being developed alongside a future lawn-care, garden-planning, and installation business. The business is still pre-launch. Its public experience introduces the planned services and collects early customer interest through a working lead-intake flow. The underlying application is designed to eventually manage the operational journey from property records and assessments through estimates, scheduling, jobs, and ongoing care; those broader workflows remain on the roadmap. The project also serves as a software engineering portfolio case study, with future multi-company SaaS potential treated as an architectural direction rather than a currently implemented product.

The challenge

• Balancing three goals: a credible future service business, a technically strong portfolio project, and a foundation that could later support a SaaS product.
• Keeping development and production data isolated while maintaining a straightforward Prisma migration workflow.
• Modeling services around real business rules instead of treating every operational task as a separate customer-selectable service.
• Presenting unfinished business and software capabilities honestly without making the application feel like a placeholder.

My contribution

• Designed and developed Yard To Table from an initial business concept into a deployed full-stack application.
• Built a responsive public lead-intake workflow with shared Zod validation, typed GraphQL operations, resolver and service-layer separation, and Prisma persistence to Neon Postgres.
• Integrated Resend for server-side lead notifications while preserving a successful lead submission when notification delivery fails after the database write.
• Created separate development and production database environments using Neon branches and environment-specific deployment configuration.
• Redesigned the public experience around a pre-launch lawn-care and garden-planning business powered by custom operational software.
• Modeled the launch lawn-care service around real business rules, bundling mowing, trimming and edging, and cleanup into one customer-selectable offering.
• Established a foundation for future property, assessment, estimate, scheduling, job, and ongoing-care workflows without prematurely implementing multi-tenancy or subscriptions.

Technical approach

• The implemented lead flow collects first and last names, Indiana service details, and the currently enabled bundled lawn-care interest through responsive loading, success, and error states.
• Shared Zod rules validate inputs on both client and server before a typed createLead GraphQL mutation reaches the resolver and service layers.
• Prisma persists leads to Neon Postgres before Resend sends the server-side notification, with failures handled according to whether the database write succeeded.
• Authentication, administrative lead management, property assessments, estimates, scheduling, jobs, payments, reporting, and SaaS multi-tenancy remain roadmap items.

• Next.js
• React
• TypeScript
• GraphQL
• Apollo Client
• Apollo Server
• Prisma
• Neon Postgres
• Zod
• Resend
• Vercel
• GitHub Actions

Solutions

• Positioned Yard To Table as a pre-launch service company powered by a custom operational platform.
• Used separate Neon branches and environment-specific database configuration for development and production.
• Implemented a layered lead-submission architecture with shared validation, GraphQL, a service layer, Prisma, and Resend.
• Kept future SaaS concerns in mind without adding speculative organization, billing, or multi-tenant complexity too early.

Outcomes

• Deployed a working public application to Vercel.
• Completed the first end-to-end vertical feature from public form submission through database persistence and email notification.
• Established an extensible architecture and roadmap for future operational workflows.
• Created a project demonstrating product design, frontend development, backend integration, database modeling, validation, deployment, and CI/CD practices.