Akash Naskar — Product Design Engineer

Product Design Engineer

Designer who builds and fixes things. Five years turning rough ideas into products that hold up as the business grows.

Selected work 03 projects
Playground · made with Gemini
Portrait, relit
Portrait, relit
Self-portraits
Headshot, no studio
Three-panel cut
Three-panel cut
Boy & dog
Key art
Fallter — game logo
Fallter — game logo
Purple Turtle — product render
Purple Turtle — product render
Same fit, relit
Same fit, relit
Suit, restyled
Tailored fit
3D avatar, on the clock
3D avatar, on the clock
Corner, restaged
Corner, restaged
Studio wall
Gallery wall
Althomes — Presentation
Althomes/2025 – 2026/Design + Engineering, solo

A booking site that runs like a business

A short-stay rental brand with bookings across all channels, easy to use CMS at a hosting bill kept near zero.

Althomes home page
TL;DR

Althomes is a curated short-stay rental brand. They needed a real booking website — guests check live availability, enquiries land in an inbox, and every page is editable without a developer.

I designed and built the whole thing solo, from the content model down to the Docker image it ships in.

Company Althomes
Role Design + Engineering, solo
Period 2025 – 2026
Scope End-to-end product design, full-stack build, infrastructure, and launch
Measured, not claimed

Near-perfect across the board — on the live site

97 Performance 0.2s first paint, 1.2s largest, zero layout shift.
98 Accessibility Usable with a keyboard or screen reader.
100 Best Practices Secure, modern, error-free. Nothing flagged.
100 SEO Clean metadata, self-maintaining sitemap.
Google PageSpeed Insights · althomes.in · desktop · 18 Jun 2026
01 / The Third Option

Small brands get two bad deals. So I built the right one.

The two bad deals

Pay little for a brochure you can't change without a developer — or pay a lot for a custom site locked to one agency and costly to move. Either way the business loses.

The one I built

A self-running platform Althomes owns outright: real bookings, self-serve content, near-zero hosting. Cheap to run, theirs to keep — nobody's leash.

02 / What I Built

A working business, not a page

Every page, photo, listing, post, even the navigation assembled from one dashboard. No developer in the loop for routine changes.

01 Content tree Every page, home and post in one editable tree.
02 Site settings Branding, navbar, footer, colours, SEO — no code.
03 Live fields Edit a value; the published site reads straight from it. WYSIWYG
04 Publish Nothing goes live until the owner says so.
Althomes admin dashboard
Althomes visual editor with live preview
PRESENTATION VIEW

See it before it goes live

The finished page renders side by side with the editor. Reword a headline or swap a hero photo and watch it land exactly as a guest will see it.

  • Edits render in the real page, not an abstract form.
  • Mistakes get caught in private, never on the live site.
  • Draft and published states stay cleanly separated.
Visual editing

Click the page, edit the field

No hunting through a CMS for the right entry. The owner clicks an element on the preview and jumps straight to the field that controls it — so the page itself becomes the editing surface.

Althomes visual editing
Real bookings

Real availability, not a fake form

Guests pick dates and see actual availability, pulled live from the property-management system the business already runs its calendars on.

  • Availability read live from the PMS, never a stale copy.
  • A RentalWise link binds each listing to its calendar.
  • No double-bookings, no manual back-and-forth.
03 / What It Does

The operational work, handled on its own

Enquiries that work

A form gets filled, a clean formatted email lands instantly in the inbox. No spreadsheet, no leads rotting in a database.

It sells itself on Google

Right titles, descriptions and a self-maintaining sitemap. Add homes and articles, the site stays discoverable on its own.

Fast pages, heavy photos

Every image auto-shrunk with no visible quality loss.

11 MB → ~54 KB
Cheap to run, theirs to keep

One Docker image drops into Railway, Vercel, or any VPS. Low bill, move providers anytime, no lock-in.

04 / Under the Hood

Deliberate engineering, end to end

Framework
Next.js 16React 19.2
Content
Sanity v5GROQ
Types & style
TypeScriptZod 4Tailwind 4
Delivery
ResendRentalWise
Infra
DockerRailway
How data moves

Two data paths carry the whole product

A Build time → content becomes pages
Source Sanity CMS — 14 docs, 13 modules
Query defineQuery() generates types
Map Dispatcher — type → component
Output React page, assembled
B On search → dates become availability
Guest Picks dates + searches
Server only Server action, Zod-validated
Cache 120s window, keyed by dates + guests
Source of truth RentalWise PMS — real calendar

Honest by construction

Secure by construction

Whole classes of attack are designed out, not filtered out — CMS token is read-only, rate limiting on APIs, server actions validate with Zod.

Portable, theirs to keep

Standalone Next output plus a three-stage Docker build — small image, runs as non-root, no Vercel-specific API. Migrated Vercel → Railway purely to cut cost.

Types are the contract

Schema and code can't silently drift. Remove a field still in use and the build breaks — not production.

05 / Built with Agents

A system handled the repetitive work — that's how it was built, too

01 / Design loop

A front-end agent builds the screen; a tester renders it and pushes back. They trade revisions until it passes review — then it ships.

02 / Feature fan-out

A planner scopes the work; a builder and a test-writer run at once, each in its own git worktree; a reviewer signs off before anything touches main.

03 / Bug hunt

A reviewer flags the bug, a builder writes the fix, a test-writer slams the door behind it with a regression test so it can't come back.

06 / What's Next

A team that never sleeps — voice agents on the phone

In prototyping
Inbound — answering the phone, 24/7
  • Live availability & booking, answered then nudged to book.
  • Property questions answered instantly at any hour.
  • Lead capture when no human is free, instead of dropping it.
Outbound — reaching out at the right moment
  • Abandoned bookings — a well-timed call recovers the revenue.
  • Campaign outreach for new homes and seasonal offers, by voice.

Built and shipped solo

Next, automating their front desk through voice agents.

Akash Naskar / Design Engineer · Althomes · 2025 – 2026