Josh Johnston

Build a full-stack web application as a team final project: a freemium TCG collection manager supporting Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, with AI-powered card identification from photos.

• Built GleamVision, a custom AI microservice for trading card photo identification, integrating single-card and multi-card (YOLO) detection endpoints with tier-gated monthly usage metering.
• Implemented Stripe freemium subscriptions with webhook-driven lifecycle management and a self-serve customer portal.
• Built tiered serverless rate limiting (Upstash Redis) across auth, payment, and AI endpoints, with MFA and RBAC-enforced admin routes.
• Integrated three external TCG APIs (Pokémon, MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh!) into a unified search experience with type-safe Zod validation.
• Maintained a CI/CD workflow with GitHub Actions, Conventional Commits, lint-staged hooks, and PR-gated feature branches.

Deployed live SaaS at project-tcg-collection.vercel.app, a production-grade app with freemium billing, AI card recognition, multi-TCG search, and a professional CI/CD pipeline, delivered as the NSCC IT Web Programming diploma capstone.

A client needed their Retreat Guru SaaS programs, lodging, and teacher profiles integrated into WordPress across 5 configurable view modes, replacing their dated existing plugin.

• Architected an MVC-inspired plugin, separating models (API/cache), controllers, custom REST endpoints, and Twig-rendered views.
• Designed a caching layer using WordPress Transients with hourly WP-Cron background refresh, exponential-backoff retry, and a health-check that auto-reschedules missed cron events.
• Built REST endpoints with nonce validation, role-based permission callbacks, and rate limiting (100 req/min); added iCal (.ics) export and URL rewrite rules for program detail pages.
• Wrote ES6+ JavaScript across multiple modules: a custom calendar grid, live search with a debounced scoring algorithm, a filterable/sortable list view, and shared ARIA accessibility utilities.

Production plugin deployed on multiple websites, integrating the Retreat Guru API with no custom database tables, resilient caching with auto-recovery, and security hardening across all endpoints and templates.

Growing koji mold requires precise temperature and humidity control. I needed a way to monitor environmental conditions in a DIY fermentation chamber and log the data for review.

Built the entire system: wired a Raspberry Pi to a temperature/humidity sensor, wrote Python scripts to poll and log readings to MariaDB, and created a local-network REST API with Express to expose the data.

Working IoT monitoring system on the local network. Learned the importance of verifying hardware specs after the original sensor failed due to excess condensation at 100% humidity.

Wolf RPG Editor games embed all dialogue and text directly in map files, making localization and bulk text edits difficult with no standard external tooling available.

Built a Python CLI tool that extracts text from Wolf RPG Editor map files into a centralized JSON file, and reinserts translated or modified text back using configurable placeholders, with linebreak handling to match in-game textbox layout.

Released on GitHub with extraction, insertion, placeholder management, and improved linebreak accuracy. No external dependencies required beyond the Python standard library.