Software · Design
Knitted
A social platform for fibre artists to share, discover, and track their knitting and crochet projects.
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- PM & Full-stack Developer
- Team
- Cross-functional team
- Context
- Capstone project
- Stack
- Next.js, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Figma
The brief
Fibre artists — knitters, crocheters, weavers — have been sharing work on Instagram and Ravelry for years, but neither platform was built for them. Instagram lacks project tracking; Ravelry hasn't had a meaningful redesign in a decade. Knitted is a purpose-built social platform: a feed of finished objects, a project tracker with yarn and needle specs, and a pattern library, all in one.
My role
I managed the full project roadmap for a cross-functional team, overseeing the software development lifecycle from ideation to deployment using Agile. I was the primary point of contact for the client, running biweekly requirement elicitation sessions and translating business needs into technical specs. I also contributed to frontend development in Next.js.
Post = project
The key design insight was that a 'post' in Knitted is also a project record. When you share a photo, you're also logging the yarn type, needle size, pattern, and status. That dual nature means your feed is also your project history — you never have to maintain a separate tracker.
Engineering highlights
RabbitMQ handles async notifications (new followers, comments, pattern requests) so they don't block the main request cycle. PostgreSQL models the many-to-many relationships between projects, yarn types, and patterns. The Next.js frontend is fully server-rendered for SEO — pattern and profile pages are indexable, which matters for a discovery-driven platform.
What I learned
Running the client relationship and the technical backlog simultaneously is a lot to hold. The biggest lesson: write acceptance criteria before sprint planning, not during. When the client says 'users should be able to discover patterns,' that means ten different things to ten different people. The sessions where we defined done upfront were the ones that shipped cleanly.