Case Study 02 · Work completed at Alpaca Systems
Turning paper inspections into a shared digital workflow
An end-to-end platform for dynamic forms, approvals, documents, and concurrent shop-floor work under practical infrastructure constraints.
Outcome
Moved inspection work from paper toward a shared tablet-based workflow with clearer approvals, documents, and handoffs.
Role and context
What I owned
- Formal title
- Junior Web Developer, later Web Developer
- Project responsibility
- Primary engineer with end-to-end responsibility for the application.
- Team context
- Worked directly with stakeholders and coordinated with adjacent application, infrastructure, and delivery contributors.
- Personally owned
- Workflow modeling, application architecture, dynamic forms, approvals, authentication, document generation, import, integration flows, and most implementation.
- Collaborator ownership
- Stakeholders defined operational needs; adjacent teams supported infrastructure, related systems, and deployment concerns.
The operational problem
Software had to match the way the work moved.
Paper-based inspection handoffs made traceability difficult and slowed collaboration across engineering, assembly, quality, and shipping.
Constraints that mattered
- The project had limited senior engineering mentorship when ownership transferred.
- Manufacturing users needed tablet-friendly flows that matched real handoffs rather than generic form software.
- The infrastructure constraint ruled out WebSockets for concurrent updates.
- Legacy reports had to remain useful during incremental adoption.
Engineering
Assembly
Quality
Shipping
REST
Durable edits
SSE
Report-scoped updates
Diagnosis
Find the system behind the symptom.
- 01
Mapped the inspection lifecycle and the ownership changes between operational roles.
- 02
Separated template definition, report execution, approvals, and document output into distinct concerns.
- 03
Identified concurrent editing as an awareness problem as well as a transport problem.
Decision log
The choices and their costs.
01
Model the workflow, not just the form
Built dynamic templates together with status transitions, role-aware actions, approvals, and notifications.
Trade-off
A richer domain model required more up-front design than a simple form database, but matched the real operation.
02
Split writes from live updates
Used REST for durable edits and Server-Sent Events with report-scoped rooms for server-to-client awareness.
Trade-off
SSE is one-directional, so the design relied on clear write endpoints rather than a single bidirectional channel.
03
Support gradual migration
Added document import and JSON-to-PDF generation so existing reports could enter and leave the new workflow.
Trade-off
Legacy document variability required defensive parsing and explicit limits instead of pretending every file was uniform.
What changed
Result and evidence
- Inspection activity gained a shared digital record across multiple operational roles.
- Tablet-based work reduced reliance on paper handoffs and improved visibility into status.
- The application could connect with related process systems and support incremental migration.
Evidence quality
The operational outcome is qualitative. No public percentage is used because a preserved measurement record is not available.
Reflection
What I would improve today
I would now formalize the domain language sooner, add stronger automated contract and workflow tests, and document the collaboration protocol as an architecture decision before implementation expanded.
This Case Study is a sanitized account of work completed at Alpaca Systems. Product and client names are withheld. Visuals are original conceptual explanations using invented data; no former-employer screenshots, source code, schemas, or proprietary diagrams are shown.