My 30-Day Startup-Style Sprint in a Corporate World

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WLH Challenge: After the Hack Submission

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: After the Hack.

One and a half month ago, I joined a company with one mission: manage its online business and develop websites and apps to operate the business lines. It sounded straightforward—but reality had a different plan.

Hands On

I spent my first two weeks digging into the company’s existing assets and resources. The verdict? From my point-of-view, the legacy website was beyond salvage, a chaotic architecture, and a database without any proper model or abstraction. I would say it was a business risk.

A tough decision had to be made: rebuild from scratch, starting with the main website.

“My GitHub Heatmap Looked Like I Was Working Nonstop”

In less than 30 days, I delivered a brand-new full-featured e-commerce platform. My GitHub heatmap looked like I had given up on sleep—and for the most part, I had. But the results were worth it:

Full-fledged e-commerce with payment gateway integration.
Dynamic shipping costs
Mapbox integration for store and pickup point locations.
New routing with permanent redirection from the legacy site for SEO continuity.
Dynamic admin panel to manage SEO, product validation, data imports, and multi-role workflows across departments, etc.

Going Live Too Soon, Testing Left Behind

The biggest challenge wasn’t technical—it was time. Barely two weeks into development, I was asked to go live immediately. Standard practices like unit testing, integration testing, usability testing, UAT, penetration testing, and stress testing? Forget it. The stakeholder doesn't hold it as important. They were skipped, and I couldn't argue otherwise.

I asked my good friend to help me setup and config server on AWS, and it's live on day-27. Just three days after going live, I continue to debug critical transaction workflow bugs—in production.

Knowing that the old website had been attacked daily and frequently went down, I also implemented honeypots, bot prevention, and extra security layers in record time.

“We Are Going To Launch The Next Business in 10 Days.”

While still debugging the first site, I was already asked to deliver the second one in another 10 days. The workload skyrocketed, and burnout and anxiety started creeping in. But maybe I'll share that story on another time.

Reflection, A Step Back, My POV

This experience felt like running a startup sprint—inside a corporate environment. It taught me that technical skills alone aren’t enough. Managing expectations, negotiating deadlines, and balancing quality vs. speed are just as important.

Agility matters, but sustainability matters more. Shipping fast is exciting, but doing it repeatedly without proper planning leads to burnout.
Security is non-negotiable. An insecure product isn’t just a technical risk—it’s a business risk.
Team culture matters. Doing everything alone is doable for a short sprint, but building a product—and a career—requires building teams and processes. But onboarding people and team building with a super-tight schedule is too scary and not a feasible option for me.

If I’m to scale this experience into a repeatable, sustainable development model—one that balances speed, quality, and personal well-being. The steps would be:

Building a small, trusted team to handle future projects. I do have that one and some most trusted buddies. But they're currently not with me on this project.
Developing templates and reusable modules for faster, safer deployments.
Sharing more about these lessons so others don’t have to learn them the hard way.

One more thought

Sometimes the hack isn’t in the code—it’s in how we manage time, energy, and expectations.

And of course, thanks to AI, I was able to minimize downtime and reduce wasted thinking time.

It wasn’t just about writing code faster—it was about having a technical assistant on-demand: