Portfolio Manifest — Updated September 19, 2026
Principal Frontend Engineer
A redesigned rebuild of Directus's admin-panel state layer, package by package: Pinia stores built fresh from the real project's domain, not reproduced from its source — early-stage, and honest about that scale, with the reasoning for each redesign decision written down as it happens.
Redesign is the default, not the exception
Directus is a real, battle-tested admin panel — a legitimate reference point for what a CMS state layer actually needs. Rather than reproducing its source, this repo takes the real project as a domain reference and rebuilds each piece from that understanding: same problem space, independent implementation, judged on its own merits rather than measured against fidelity to the original.
Independent refs that must stay in sync are a bug waiting to happen
The real Directus useAppStore tracks hydration as three separate, independently-mutated refs —
hydrated, hydrating, error — nothing stops all three from being set at
once into a state that's actually meaningless (hydrated and errored, simultaneously). The same shape
of risk showed up independently in this repo's own first pass at session state: accessToken and
expiresAt as two separate nullable refs that had to be kept in lockstep by hand.
Both cases were collapsed into a single value with a fixed set of valid shapes —
Session | null for auth, a { status } union for hydration. Invalid combinations
aren't handled defensively; they're not representable at all.
The second instance (useAppStore) wasn't a coincidence — it was deliberately checked for,
once the first fix in useAuthStore established the pattern was worth applying consistently
rather than treating it as a one-off.
A completeness audit, prompted by comparing this package's file count against the real source
100% statement/branch coverage was already true before this audit — and it still let four real gaps through, because every line executing isn't the same as the right value ending up in the right place. All four found and fixed in the same pass, once file-count parity with the real source prompted a second look.
Session wasn't exported, unlike every other store's public type — a consumer
could use the value but never name its type.
exports map with no ./package.json subpath blocks any tooling that
resolves a package's own package.json directly.
loggedIn, fullName), never the raw
stored state — a bug that swapped stored fields would still pass every existing test.
What prompted it: asked why this package had more files than the real source's — the honest
answer was the real packages/stores is one flat store with 7 raw refs and no computed properties
or actions at all. That comparison is what triggered auditing every file in this package against itself, not
just against the original.
CI on every push, not a one-time local check
Every store change runs through the same five real gates before being called done — format, lint, style lint,
build, test — then again on GitHub Actions infrastructure this repo doesn't control. Two real CI failures were
hit and fixed during this build, both from the same root cause: pushing a
yarn.lock or a config file ahead of the file it actually depends on.
Across every store added so far, real assertions against real behavior — including regression tests for the two bugs this project found and fixed in itself.
0 open findings as of this page's last update — verified against the repository's own Code Scanning API, not asserted from memory.
Building more than the reference, on purpose
A direct file-count comparison against the real source could have gone the other way: find out the real
packages/stores is a single 38-line file and conclude this repo was over-built. Instead, the real
source's own code says otherwise — a literal @TODO maybe move to userStore comment sitting on its
authenticated field, acknowledging the flat single-store shape was never the intended end state.
Building three purpose-specific stores instead of one grab-bag isn't scope creep relative to that; it's
finishing a direction the original source already pointed at but hadn't taken yet.
Now the state layer has something to sit inside
app/ is a real Vue app, not a placeholder: routed (vue-router), styled, with a
working login/logout flow against a simulated authClient —
try it yourself:
demo@directus-main.dev / demo1234, or anything else to see the real
InvalidCredentialsError path. packages/errors shipped alongside it: a real
DirectusError class hierarchy, redesigned away from the source's factory-function-plus-enum
pattern.
Adding a test for the router guard's "already logged in" redirect exposed a genuine, previously silent
defect: earlier tests' mounted components were never unmounted, and since they all shared one router
instance, their stale registrations interfered with later tests. Fixed with
enableAutoUnmount, applied everywhere the same risk existed — not just where it had actually
failed yet.
This page's own numbers were stuck describing an earlier phase until this pass — the manifest above, the issue tracker, the wiki, and the external portfolio hub all got the same audit. Verifiable is only true if it's kept current.
Session persistence shipped, then a real server started
Session persistence shipped next: a hard refresh no longer logs you out, and testing it caught a real bug
along the way. Then api/ started: a real Express server with a tested
POST /auth/login, reusing the same InvalidCredentialsError the app already used
against its fake client — the server side isn't simulated anymore, even though app/ hasn't been
pointed at it yet.
$subscribe's default flush option waits for the next Vue tick — fine for UI updates, wrong
for a cookie write that needs to survive a real page unload right after login. A test that set a session
and immediately checked the cookie caught it: the write hadn't happened yet. Fixed with an explicit
{ flush: 'sync' }.
authClient.ts's fake client and api/'s real route both hardcode the same demo
credentials. Not centralized into a shared file: that duplication is a symptom of the fake client being
temporary, and resolves to zero once app/ calls the real endpoint instead of simulating one —
only the backend should ever know what a valid login looks like.