VINwiki
Sole backend engineer and co-founder. Built the entire server-side platform for a social vehicle history app — from zero to 500K+ users.
The Product
VINwiki is a mobile application for ad-hoc social vehicle reporting and spotting. Users can look up any vehicle by VIN, contribute sightings, and build a crowdsourced history — creating a living record for every car on the road.
The Challenge
The platform needed a backend capable of ingesting and indexing over 50 million vehicle records while simultaneously serving a real-time social experience for a rapidly growing user base. Everything had to be built from scratch — API, data layer, ETL pipelines — by a single engineer on a startup timeline.
What I Built
I designed and implemented the full backend: RESTful API powering the mobile clients, user authentication and account management, vehicle lookup and history services, and the social reporting layer.
I also built ETL scripts to ingest, normalize, and index 50M+ vehicle records from external data sources into the platform — making them instantly searchable for end users.
Technology
Backend
PHP — purpose-built API layer serving the mobile clients
Database
MySQL — optimized for high-volume vehicle record queries and social data
Infrastructure
AWS — cloud-hosted for scalability and reliability
Data Pipeline
Custom ETL scripts for ingesting and normalizing 50M+ vehicle records
Built as a co-founder in 2015, the VINwiki backend was taken from concept to production in six months — a single engineer shipping a platform that now serves over half a million users.