Sometimes, the smartest move isn’t to throw money at the problem - it’s to rethink the approach.

And the best part?

This kicked off a modernization plan for ~19 other apps our company manages.

Expo is now becoming our go-to for building fast, maintainable, cross-platform apps. 🚀

2 weeks later…
✅ Rebuilt the entire app like-for-like
✅ Modern tech stack
✅ Released to production on both iOS and Android

💰 Saved $40,000+
🕒 Delivered in a fraction of the time

I wasn’t having it.

I pitched the higher-ups to let me take a crack at rebuilding it - properly this time.
✅ Cross-platform
✅ Maintainable
✅ Fast

My plan: Rewrite the whole thing using @expo.dev

We were already under pressure, so the company brought in a consultancy.

They took 1 week to “investigate” what I figured out in 5 minutes, then quoted:
💰 $40,000+
🕒 6–8 weeks of dev time

Out of nowhere, our iOS mobile app broke in production.

I dug in and found it was built on an ancient framework - so outdated it was basically unupgradable.

Checked Android.
Same story. 😬

We integrated DynaORM with our CDK setup, and it’s now running in production.

The results have been amazing:
⚡ Faster development
🧠 Fewer errors
😌 Happier devs

It’s been a game changer for our team.

What is DynaORM?

It’s a lightweight, type-safe client for Amazon DynamoDB that focuses on developer experience.

Instead of wrestling with marshaling, SDK quirks, and verbose code, you get a schema-first, fluent API that makes working with DynamoDB intuitive and type-safe.

A few rainy weekends ago, I decided to experiment. ☔

I hacked together a small ORM to simplify our workflow and give us Prisma-like ergonomics for DynamoDB.

Meet DynaORM
npmjs.com/package/dynaorm

This is why I love open source. 💛
You start by scratching your own itch… and before you know it, something you built in your free time is making someone else’s day a little easier.

Never underestimate the ripple effects of sharing your work 🌊

Fast forward to today:
✨ Over 20,000 downloads every week
✨ Now the default in new Adonis projects

What started as a small learning exercise ended up helping thousands of developers. That still blows my mind.

I had no idea what I was doing at first.
It was a lot of trial and error, tinkering late at night, and reading docs I barely understood 😅

Eventually, I hacked together a tiny MVP that actually worked. 🚀