Overview
Harper is a distributed database and application platform. Studio is the interface developers use to manage it: organizations, clusters, databases, tables, applications, and deployments, all from the browser.
I architected and built the new Studio, a distributed DBMS UI and orchestration layer, from the ground up with React and the TanStack libraries, while keeping the legacy database management interfaces running and optimized during the platform transition.
What I built
- The foundation. Routing, data fetching, and state built on TanStack, structured so new management surfaces could ship without re-plumbing the app.
- Database browsing that respects real data. Rendering JSON objects directly in table cells instead of flattening them to
[object Object]. - Application lifecycle flows. Import and create package improvements, a redeploy package reference modal, and guarding the create flow against duplicate submissions.
- Access management. SSH key management with validated forms and correctly wired authorization links during application import.
Documentation alongside the product
Shipping the UI was half the job. I also wrote the matching docs in Harper's documentation repo: Studio itself, organization management, application and database management, Grafana, cluster editing, and the API tab, so the product and its docs launched together.
Outcome
Studio became the primary way developers interact with Harper clusters, and the codebase is open source. I merged more than 50 pull requests into it across the build and the following iterations.