Work / 05 case studies
A closer look at how I approach client work: the problem, the decisions behind the build, and the results that mattered to the business. Each study focuses on outcomes, not just screenshots.
01Event listings for the Raleigh-Durham area were scattered across a dozen city and venue sites. I built LocalEvents, a full-stack aggregator that pulls listings from ticketing APIs and city calendars into one searchable, map-based feed with saved events, email/SMS digests, and a moderated edit workflow.
02Raleigh's historic places were spread across separate preservation, National Register, and historic district datasets with no single public view. Open Raleigh is a map-first community archive of roughly 9,000 sites — including over 1,000 already demolished — with search, faceted filters, a moderated contribution workflow, and all of it republished under CC BY 4.0 through a documented public API.
03A painting contractor working in Apex, NC since 1995 was invisible to search: the whole site was a client-rendered React SPA that served crawlers an empty div, and a hidden route collected customers' bank account and routing numbers through a third-party email service. I rebuilt it as a 25-page static Astro site on Cloudflare Workers with its own lead pipeline.
04Most AI features on this site call a hosted API. ai.coltoncs.com is the opposite: a gated LLM and image-generation platform running entirely on a home PC I own and administer — two models served concurrently on a single RTX 3090, a chat interface, a ComfyUI image pipeline, and a Cloudflare Tunnel and Access policy that make it reachable from anywhere without opening a port.
05Concert and festival posters pack in a lineup, dates, venue, and location that aren't easy to search or save. PosterOCR turns a photo of a poster into structured, searchable event data using Claude's vision model, with caching to keep repeat lookups fast and cheap.