Full-Stack
GEL Virtual Mailbox & Logistics Platform
Client: Global Express Limited
Global Express Limited is a Caribbean freight-forwarding and virtual mailbox business. Customers across Barbados, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and other islands ship to a US address; GEL receives, processes, and forwards their packages, and bills them for it. I have been the sole engineer on their Laravel platform since 2016, building and maintaining the system that runs that operation end to end.
The domain
This is not a CRUD app. A package moves through a real lifecycle, from intake, barcode, and media attachments to freight-rate calculation, invoicing, payment, and forwarding, with payment and claim statuses at each step. Shipping eligibility depends on the customer's country, since some destinations are allowed and others are blocked by business and carrier rules. Staff, agents, and customers each see a different slice of the system through role-based permissions. Invoices can be issued per package or merged in bulk into a single payment.
What I built
A Laravel platform covering that whole lifecycle: package intake and barcode generation, a media library for package photos and documents, country-aware freight-rate calculation, per-package and bulk-merged invoicing, Stripe checkout for payment, customer and staff notifications, internal ticketing, Excel exports, and the admin-heavy DataTables interfaces the team runs the business on. The code is organized into service, repository, query, and action layers with per-domain events and observers, so the business rules live in one place and the package lifecycle stays consistent wherever it is triggered. Telescope provides production visibility.
Engineering for the long run
The part most worth noting is longevity: this system has run a live business for years, through changing requirements. I am now modernizing it to Laravel 13 with an Inertia and Vue 3 frontend, including a hardened, webhook-driven billing path and test coverage around the money flow. Knowing where a long-lived payment integration can fail silently, and improving it without disrupting a running business, is the same work I do for integration clients.
My role
Sole engineer: architecture, build, and ongoing maintenance since 2016, and now the full modernization.
The domain
This is not a CRUD app. A package moves through a real lifecycle, from intake, barcode, and media attachments to freight-rate calculation, invoicing, payment, and forwarding, with payment and claim statuses at each step. Shipping eligibility depends on the customer's country, since some destinations are allowed and others are blocked by business and carrier rules. Staff, agents, and customers each see a different slice of the system through role-based permissions. Invoices can be issued per package or merged in bulk into a single payment.
What I built
A Laravel platform covering that whole lifecycle: package intake and barcode generation, a media library for package photos and documents, country-aware freight-rate calculation, per-package and bulk-merged invoicing, Stripe checkout for payment, customer and staff notifications, internal ticketing, Excel exports, and the admin-heavy DataTables interfaces the team runs the business on. The code is organized into service, repository, query, and action layers with per-domain events and observers, so the business rules live in one place and the package lifecycle stays consistent wherever it is triggered. Telescope provides production visibility.
Engineering for the long run
The part most worth noting is longevity: this system has run a live business for years, through changing requirements. I am now modernizing it to Laravel 13 with an Inertia and Vue 3 frontend, including a hardened, webhook-driven billing path and test coverage around the money flow. Knowing where a long-lived payment integration can fail silently, and improving it without disrupting a running business, is the same work I do for integration clients.
My role
Sole engineer: architecture, build, and ongoing maintenance since 2016, and now the full modernization.
Tech & skills
Laravel
MySQL
PHP
Stripe
Vue.js
Logistics
DataTables