Weekend Trendz is a women's-fashion storefront I built in 2021 — the whole shopping flow in Next.js 12: paginated category browsing, dynamic product pages, cart, orders, and account pages, with Google sign-in and Firestore behind it. I managed user and cart state with React context and custom hooks, and lazy-loaded the Firebase SDK to keep the bundle small.
The part that dates well: an embedded support chatbot you talk to. It takes voice input and speaks back through the Web Speech API, wired to an NLP service I wrote in Python and hosted on Heroku — conversational, voice-first product UI three years before LLMs made it easy. I also built the store's admin dashboard (wt-manage) for catalog and order management on Firebase.
The hard part
Conversational, voice-first commerce in 2021
Long before LLMs made chat UIs trivial, I wanted shoppers to just talk to the store. I wired the browser's Web Speech API for speech-to-text and text-to-speech on the front end, and stood up my own NLP service in Python on Heroku to interpret intents and answer — so a customer could ask about products by voice and hear a reply. It's rough next to a modern agent, but it's the same instinct I'm chasing now, five years earlier.
Highlights
- Built the full e-commerce flow in Next.js 12 — paginated category browsing, dynamic product pages, cart, orders, and account pages.
- Added a voice-controlled support chatbot (Web Speech API speech-to-text and text-to-speech) backed by an NLP service I wrote in Python on Heroku.
- Managed user and cart state with React context and custom hooks (useForm, debounce), with Google auth on Firebase + Firestore.
- Lazy-loaded the Firebase SDK to cut bundle size.
- Built the companion admin dashboard (wt-manage) for catalog and order management.
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