Case study · 01/2022 — 03/2022
Crop2Cash
Crop2Cash is an agritech marketplace that helps smallholder farmers in Nigeria source seeds, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs. The work was on the backend side: APIs that drive the marketplace surface, the chart endpoints that let operators see what is actually moving through the platform, and a programming model that made integrating with the existing services much less painful than it had been.
Problem
The platform sat on top of a sprawl of services that had each grown organically. Every new feature meant re-learning the integration story for that part of the system. The dashboards that operators relied on were either slow, stale, or both, because they pulled from places that were not designed for analytical reads. The need was twofold: a sharper integration story so new features land faster, and a chart layer that surfaces fresh data without melting the transactional database.
Approach
The chart APIs were built with read-side projections in mind — denormalised, query-shaped views of the data that operators actually wanted to see, kept in sync with the transactional store but isolated from its load. The programming system was a thin convention layer that made integration with existing services explicit: a contract per service, a generator for the boilerplate, and tests at the boundary so contracts could not silently rot. Postgres did the heavy lifting; the discipline was in keeping read and write paths cleanly separated.
Outcome
Operators got dashboards that loaded quickly against fresh data, and the team got a faster path to landing new features against the existing service surface. The chart layer scaled with usage rather than collapsing under it, and the integration conventions reduced the per-feature cost of touching the rest of the platform.