BlueBlox Trade Repository

The BlueBlox Trade Repository is a subscription platform hosting a large body of interrelated trade information for internal users and paying subscribers. It was the largest system I led at Master & Mouse, and the project that most shaped how I think about data-heavy applications.

The hard problem was the data, not the UI: a high volume of interconnected records that customers needed to navigate fluidly without getting lost. The challenge wasn't displaying records. It was making the relationships between them discoverable.

I chose WordPress as the foundation, betting its data model and plugin ecosystem would let me extend faster than building from scratch would. That decision held up: most of the system was custom plugin code, but it built on WordPress primitives rather than fighting them.