The Site That Built Itself While Everything Else Fell Apart

Or: how two layoffs in two months became a four-month architecture sprint

The Inciting Incident(s)

November 2025. A beauty retailer I'd spent years building digital systems for decided to "optimize resources." If you've worked in ecom long enough, you know that phrase. It means someone in finance found a spreadsheet.

I processed it in the only language that made sense: PM jargon. "The Job Security microservice has experienced unexpected downtime." It was funnier than crying. Barely.

I found another role. Beauty company number two.

February 2026. They did the same thing.

Two layoffs. Two months. Two beauty companies. At a certain point, you stop taking it personally and start taking it structurally. Single-tenant employment is a single point of failure. I'd been preaching composable, decoupled systems to clients for years. Time to apply the pattern to myself.

What Existed Before (a Confession)

When the first layoff hit, sugartown.io was alive but running on a stack held together with PHP templates and determination. A custom WordPress block theme. A Python script that pushed structured data to WordPress via REST API. A Knowledge Graph of professional learnings, each one a product management post-mortem, wearing a blog post as a disguise.

It worked. In the way that duct-taped things work. style.css was in a fistfight with theme.json over who got to set the background colour. The design system existed as vibes and an optimistic collection of st-* CSS classes. Tokens were aspirational. Governance was a Google Doc.

The Decision

WordPress is a renderer, not an architecture. The content model had outgrown it. And if the site was going to serve as a portfolio (which, suddenly, it very much needed to), it had to demonstrate the systems thinking I'd spent fifteen years practising.

The plan: Sanity CMS, React, a proper monorepo. The headless MACH architecture I'd been speccing for enterprise clients, now at a scale of one.

Here's what changed that made this actually possible: I've spent my career telling engineers what to build. For the first time, I had engineers who couldn't resent me for it. I'm calling them the Agentic Caucus. Claude Code as the primary collaborator: architecture, epic authoring, code execution. Gemini and ChatGPT on the tasks they handle better. Every tool with documented failure modes. PRDs for the prompts. Governance for the outputs. Human review at every gate.

I have never shipped faster. I have also never written so many governance documents about myself.

What Got Built (November 2025 to April 2026)

November to mid-January

Six production releases to the live WordPress site. The design system went from a CSS file and a wish to a three-tier token architecture with WCAG contrast governance and documented component contracts. The Knowledge Graph got taxonomy v4, interactive filters, and an archive system. A Resume Factory pipeline turned career data into tailored PDFs.

Brief sidebar on the Resume Factory: I quickly discovered that AI will hallucinate your career history with complete confidence and zero warning until after the interview goes sideways. The governance got strict fast. Human-in-the-loop is not optional when the human's employment history is the product.

Mid-January to January 31

Sanity Studio and the React frontend bootstrapped in parallel for two weeks. Schemas designed, GROQ queries written, components wired. Both repos then merged into a single pnpm + Turborepo workspace on January 31, commit history preserved. apps/web, apps/studio, packages/design-system: the structure I'd been drawing on whiteboards for enterprise clients, now real and running on localhost.

February to April

Eight migration stages brought the frontend to CMS content parity. The design system extracted into its own package with Storybook documentation. Three hundred and twenty-six legacy WordPress URLs classified and redirected.

The site went from dev experiment to deployable platform.

The Portfolio Argument

I didn't build a portfolio site. I built a composable content platform with structured data, a governed design system, documented AI collaboration workflows, and a monorepo architecture that could scale to a team of twenty. I did it while unemployed, using the same discipline I'd apply to an enterprise product: epic-driven development, structured releases, governance as a feature.

The site isn't a brochure. It is a POC (proof of concept).

And yes, it started because the beauty industry laid me off. Twice.