Asset Licensing Platform
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Front-end Developer
- Stack
- AWS S3
- Next.js
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React
The problem
Team managers needed a reliable way to upload licensed media assets and distribute the associated licenses to customers through a new web application.
The approach
Storage belonged to the third-party provider, so the upload path was given rather than designed: their system issued presigned URLs and the browser uploaded straight to their buckets against them. That carried a second benefit worth keeping: more technical users could skip the interface entirely and upload to the bucket direct. Owned the upload journey end to end, and the work was making that same path safe and unsurprising for everyone else: uploads restricted to approved file types and routed to the correct bucket.
The third-party schema
The asset data came from a third-party provider, and its schema kept moving. The fix was not more defensive parsing on our side but a narrower contract: agreed a schema with the provider that exposed only the fields the application actually needed: less surface to handle, and less of their data leaving their system in the first place. It still changed underneath us, usually by accident, so the real cost was ongoing. Someone had to spot it quickly and tell the team that the failure was upstream rather than ours. That communication turned out to be as much of the job as the parsing.
The outcome
The engagement closed with the MVP handed over to a client who was happy with it. Handover was treated as part of the build rather than an afterthought: documented setup for local development and for monitoring logs, so the team inheriting it could run and debug it without us.