Case study · Product and software engineering
Book Jersey Shore
A direct-booking platform for Jersey Shore vacation rentals, built from the ground up.
The problem
Vacation rentals are often split across listing sites, messages, contracts, payment records, calendars, and check-in instructions. I wanted to build a practical place where hosts and guests could find each other directly and keep the important parts of a booking clear.
What I built
I built the product end-to-end: the public site, listing and search experience, account flows, messaging, rental agreements, e-signing, payment records, calendar details, and the host-facing workflows around a real stay.
Architecture and stack
The system combines an Astro public site with an Expo and React Native application, an Express and TypeScript API, and a Postgres/PostGIS data layer. Ory Kratos handles identity, while MinIO provides object storage. The pieces are separated so the public marketing surface, product workflows, identity, and data can evolve without becoming one tangled application.
- Client: Expo, React Native, and web interfaces
- Public site: Astro and TypeScript
- API: Express and TypeScript
- Data and infrastructure: Postgres, PostGIS, Ory Kratos, and MinIO
Engineering decisions
The central design choice was to support direct relationships between hosts and guests instead of treating every rental like a transaction inside one closed marketplace. That made clarity and record-keeping important: agreements, signatures, payment information, availability, and check-in details need to stay connected without taking control away from the people making the booking.
Building the system also meant working across product decisions, interface design, backend services, authentication, data modeling, deployment details, and the less visible work required to keep a real platform understandable and maintainable.
What I learned
The difficult part of a product like this is not any single feature. It is making many ordinary pieces agree with each other as the product grows. Book Jersey Shore has been a long-running exercise in turning an idea into a working system, then improving the boundaries, workflows, and records that make the system useful in practice.