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Arthur Smith, Product Engineer

Arthurficial

§ Selected Work

A short shelf. Each one is long-form.

Three projects I’d point to. I’d rather show you three I can defend than twelve I can’t. Each includes role, constraints, what moved, and what I’d do differently.

'25
Full-Time · Platform Rebuild

MyBaseGuide. WordPress → Next.js in 30 days.

Lead Frontend · Jan–Feb 2024

Military base resource platform serving hundreds of thousands of military families. The stack was a decade-old WordPress install with a content editorial calendar that couldn't miss a day. The brief: migrate to a modern Next.js + Sanity CMS stack without losing SEO, without interrupting content ops, and without paying down the rewrite with a launch outage.

Preserved every canonical URL and redirect. Built a migration pipeline that pulled WP posts into Sanity with a same-day preview for the editorial team. Shipped a rebuilt homepage, base directory, and article templates in 30 days.

100%
URL parity maintained
30 days
Total migration window
0
Content-ops downtime
Next.jsSanity.ioSEO migrationContent modeling
'25
Side Project · AI Observability

Observare.ai. A venture, a shutdown, a lesson.

Founder / Product Engineer · 2025

An AI observability tool for small teams running LLM-backed features. Built the product, the landing page, the billing, the onboarding, the docs. Shipped. Found customers. Did not find a durable market.

The write-up is more useful than the product was. It covers what I misread about PMF, the specific shape of the "interested but won't pay" crowd, and the instrumentation data that predicted the outcome three months before I was willing to accept it.

8 mo
Build → shutdown window
31
Conversations with users
1
Hard-earned retrospective
Next.jsAI/MLStartupPostHogStripe
'25
Client Work · E-commerce

The Charcuterist. A Nashville specialty in code.

Design + Build · 2024

Website and ordering platform for a Nashville-based artisan charcuterie business. Full-stack design and build: brand-adjacent visual design, online ordering integrated with Toast POS, event-catering flows, and a CMS the owner actually uses.

Scope included the parts small businesses usually skip — real product photography plans, a clear event-catering funnel, and an admin experience that didn't need a Slack message every time a board went out.

Next.jsToast integrationE-commerceCMS
© 2026 Arthur Smith. All rights reserved.Vol. III · No. 04 · Nashville