Builder Brigade

## Context

Builder Brigade keeps a home-construction or renovation project organized from concept to completion. The work of a build — guided checklists broken into phases, decisions and the resources behind them, progress posts, moodboards, a community feed — usually scatters across email, spreadsheets, and group chats; Builder Brigade puts it in one place, and exports the finished record to PDF or Excel. It is built for the homeowners, contractors, and DIY builders running those projects.

## Approach

Builder Brigade is a single-module app organized by feature: mybuild, community, discover, moodboard, profile, onboarding, and subscription each own their data, domain, and presentation over a shared core. The product is wide — guided checklists, a community feed, moodboards, progress posts, and export are very different problems sharing one app — and the feature seams are what keep that breadth from turning into sprawl. Konsist boundary tests enforce them: core may never import a feature, and feature-to-feature edges live in a curated allowlist.

The backend is Hasura, spoken through Apollo — eighty-eight GraphQL operations, including live queries over WebSocket subscriptions, with a SQLite-backed normalized cache underneath.

## Technical decisions

The defining recent work is offline-first. A construction site is the canonical bad-signal environment, so the app now treats the network as optional: Room snapshots capture server state, edits land in a local outbox, and Hilt-injected WorkManager workers drain that outbox — checklist edits, task status, posts, poll votes, comments — replaying them against Hasura when connectivity returns, while Apollo live queries reconcile whatever changed in the meantime.

On screen, a project is a flat set of tasks that has to read the way a build actually unfolds — grouped into phases, in build order. The grouping is derived state, recomputed only when the task list changes, and the sort encodes the real rule: unnamed phases sink to the bottom, the rest order by their order field, ties break alphabetically.

val groupTasks = projectDataState.projectData?.groupTasks.orEmpty()
val groupedTasks by remember(groupTasks) {
    derivedStateOf {
        groupTasks
            .groupBy { it.projectPhase }
            .toList()
            .sortedWith(
                compareBy<Pair<ProjectPhase?, List<GroupTask>>> { it.first == null || it.first?.name?.isBlank() == true }
                    .thenBy { it.first?.order ?: Int.MAX_VALUE }
                    .thenBy { it.first?.name?.lowercase(java.util.Locale.ROOT).orEmpty() }
            )
            .associate { (phase, tasks) -> phase?.name.orEmpty() to tasks }
    }
}

## Outcome

Builder Brigade is a mature, shipped product — version 1.30, a full Play Store listing, and a GitHub Actions + Fastlane pipeline that deploys each release. It grew there over six hundred and seventy-four commits, all but one of them mine, and the feature-based foundation took on a genuinely broad set — checklists, feed, moodboards, export, and now offline-first — without the app losing its shape. For something this wide, holding that shape was the outcome that mattered most.