The mess
My first contract work, brought to me by my friend Luka, who’d been offered the gig and wasn’t sure where to start. UAV Pro had years of features piled on top of each other: chat, file storage, weather monitoring, classroom management, billing. All grown organically, no cohesion. We had a week.
Three users, one platform
The platform served three completely different people. Students checking assignments and weather before flights. Teachers managing classrooms and communications. Administrators overseeing everything. They needed different logic, not cosmetic variations.
I led the design. Weather widgets for pre-flight checks. Event planning for meetups. Project management with drag-and-drop file handling. Threaded messaging that didn’t feel like an inbox. Luka implemented from my references and I polished. The dashboard came out feeling like a command centre rather than a pile.
How it went
They loved it. Then the company collapsed, rebranded, and disappeared from view, so I’ll never know what shipped.
A useful first taste of contract work. Solve the practical problem cleanly, hand it over, get on with the next thing.