Prostore

• Designing a Scalable Data Model

  Structuring products, categories, variants, users, carts, and orders in a clean relational schema can get complex quickly, especially when planning for growth or future features.

• Authentication & Authorization

  Implementing secure login, account creation, protected routes, and admin-only areas requires careful session handling, password hashing, and role-based access controls.

• Handling Serverless Constraints

  Vercel’s serverless functions have cold starts, execution limits, and connection-handling quirks when working with databases like PostgreSQL, making connection pooling and efficient queries critical.

• Product Filtering & Search

  Building performant filtering (by category, price, tags, etc.) and responsive search features can require fine-tuned queries, indexes, and caching to avoid slow responses.

• Cart State Management

  Maintaining an accurate, persistent cart across sessions—whether tied to a user account, cookies, or server state—adds complexity to both the frontend and backend layers.

• Checkout Flow & Error Handling

  Ensuring a smooth checkout experience with proper validation, order creation, and fallback handling for failed requests requires rigorous testing and thoughtful UX design.

• Image Optimization & Rendering

  Managing product photos (thumbnails, responsive images, Next.js <Image> optimization) becomes increasingly challenging as the catalog grows.

• Admin Dashboard Complexity

  Building analytics, product CRUD operations, order tracking, and other admin-level features demands secure data handling and clean UI patterns.

• SEO for Dynamic Pages

  Ecommerce sites rely heavily on SEO, so generating metadata, canonical URLs, and indexable product pages requires careful SSR/SSG configuration in Next.js.

• Performance With Dynamic Content

  As product grids and filters rely on serverless data fetching, keeping interactions fast and responsive can require batching queries, caching, or pre-computing certain results.

• State Synchronization Between Client & Server

  Ensuring UI state matches backend reality (especially for inventory counts or cart updates) can cause tricky edge cases.

• Error Boundaries & Resilience

  Ecommerce flows must handle unexpected errors gracefully—from database timeouts to failed serverless invocations—to avoid breaking the shopping experience.

“Working on ProStore significantly strengthened my full-stack skill set, particularly around TypeScript and Next.js. I learned how to design safer, more predictable code using strong TypeScript patterns, and deepened my understanding of server-side rendering and data-loading strategies in real-world scenarios. I also became much more confident with Prisma and Zod—using Prisma to model and query relational data effectively, and Zod to enforce strict runtime validation across API routes and forms. Altogether, the project pushed me to write cleaner, more reliable full-stack code while building scalable application architecture.