Company portal rebuild

In a single prompt I rebuilt my 7 year old customer portal for my company which has long needed a face lift. Now it uses modern React and plugs directly into my existing API's.

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Inspiration

We started our company over 7 years ago, to allow offices, shopping malls and airports a convenient way to separate their recyclable from landfill waste. Believe it or not, it's still a big problem with a lot of material going to landfill. The core offering is an IoT smartbin, but we also have a customer management portal.

That portal I wrote 7 years ago as one of my first React projects. We've been adding features to it, it was becoming hard to maintain and it was long overdue for a face lift. I didn't want to rebuild everything from scratch, but I also wanted to get rid of old weight and start using modern technologies and make it easier to maintain, but at the same time plug into an existing API.

What it does

This is a customer portal that our customers would see when they login to manage their existing smart bin devices, locations and displays.

How we built it

Single prompt, explained components and existing API, then enhanced the prompt and here we go

Challenges we ran into

For some reason the first time we ran it Bolt hung and wasn't able to build it, my whole browser froze. Had to try again. I used the enhance prompt to understand a bit how Bolt interprets those instructions and making sure the structure was right. I also tried importing the repository through github and reference existing code in the prompt, but this approach resulted in issues with dependency resolution, which I didn't want to spend too long troubleshooting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It looks convervative, but that was exactly what I was going for. It's a rebuild of something we already have with a couple of changes. We can talk internally with the sales team and use a functional demoable site, to discuss whether these changes work or not. Instead of weeks, we can now test new ideas in a few minutes.

What we learned

One prompt might not be enough to completely rebuild the entire customer portal, which plugs into existing systems, but it comes very very close. I will manually tweak it and play around with it afterwards.

What's next for Company portal rebuild

Test it locally with real environment variables, make a few tweaks and test wit customers to start using the new interface.

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