Bakchich

Bakchich is a creator monetization platform designed for creators, digital artists, and influencers to monetize premium content, sell digital products, and accept tips and memberships from their audience.

I joined Bakchich as a Full-Stack Software Developer when the company faced significant engineering debt. The platform was running on an aging, monolithic PHP backend coupled with server-rendered templates that struggled with high latency, poor SEO indexation, slow development cycles, and environment inconsistencies across developer machines.

My mandate was to lead a complete architectural overhaul: modernizing the codebase to a high-performance Next.js frontend, establishing a scalable Nx monorepo, and building reproducible development and CI/CD pipelines using NixOS, Docker, and Azure.

1. PHP to Next.js Migration (Strangler-Fig Pattern)

Instead of attempting a risky "big-bang" rewrite on a live platform handling active payment transactions, I executed a Strangler-Fig migration strategy:

• Incremental Routing: Placed a modern edge proxy layer in front of the application to route traffic incrementally from legacy PHP endpoints to newly built Next.js pages.
• Core Application Modernization: Rebuilt high-traffic creator storefronts, checkout flows, and user dashboards into server-side rendered (SSR) Next.js routes.
• State & Data Parity: Introduced Prisma ORM over the existing MySQL database schema, abstracting database operations into type-safe queries shared across legacy and modern components without breaking live tables.

[ Incoming User Traffic ] ──> ( Edge Proxy Router )
                                      │
             ┌────────────────────────┴────────────────────────┐
             ▼                                                 ▼
[ Legacy PHP Monolith ]                             [ Modern Next.js SSR App ]
(Phased out incrementally)                           (Prisma ORM + MySQL)

2. Nx Monorepo Architecture

Organized the entire frontend and API abstraction layer into a unified Nx monorepo:

• Shared UI Libraries: Abstracted design system components into a shared UI package using Tailwind CSS, ensuring consistent design across the creator storefront and internal admin panels.
• Shared Config & Utils: Centralized i18n translation strings, type definitions, and API client wrappers to maintain end-to-end type safety.

3. Reproducible Dev Environments & CI/CD

• NixOS & nix-shell: Solved the classic "works on my machine" problem by authoring declarative shell.nix configurations. Developers could spin up identical Node.js, PHP, and database runtimes with a single terminal command.
• Docker & Azure Pipelines: Built automated GitHub Actions workflows that ran linting, type-checking, and tests before building containerized Docker images deployed to Azure App Services.