i-Diplomat offers diplomats and tourists in Israel a single point of entry for healthcare and practical services - online and in-person doctor visits, digital prescriptions, lab tests at home, SIM recharge, urgent dental and psychological support - in four languages. When I joined, the project was semi-built: backend skeleton and frontend scaffolding existed, but nothing was production-ready. There was no other developer. Just a business owner with a roadmap in his head, a half-finished system, and a production server. The brief was open-ended: take what's here, talk to the owner, turn it into a real product, and keep it running.

The hardest part wasn't code - it was translating business intent into a working spec. The owner thought in services and customer journeys; the system needed tables, endpoints, and integration flows. Every new feature started as a conversation, became a sequence of decisions, then became a migration.I worked feature-by-feature: sit with the owner, map the user journey, identify which third parties had to be involved, model the data, decide what could be automated vs. what needed a human, then build.

Two things kept this manageable as one person:
‍Logging built in early - instrumented the system before adding new features so future debugging wouldn't be guesswork
‍One vendor per job - each integration owns one concern (SendGrid = email, Twilio = SMS, Zoom = consultations, Superpharm = prescriptions, Tranzilla = payments). Clean boundaries kept the system understandable for a team of one.

Two new product lines, end to end.
- Lab Tests at Home. New service from zero: catalog, ordering flow, address + time-slot selection, payment, technician dispatch coordination, status tracking. Modeled the data, built the customer-facing flow, wired the admin queue, plugged the receipt and confirmation flow into the existing notification system.
- Health Service Subscriptions. Monthly and annual plans (Diplomat Care and variants) — pricing, billing cycles, renewal logic, prorated charges, active/expired state machine, and the admin views to manage exceptions. Tranzilla on the payments side, SendGrid for lifecycle emails.

Offline appointment system. Booking in-person doctor visits — availability, confirmations, cancellations, rescheduling, multi-state workflow, time-zone handling, multilingual notifications. The most complex single feature in the platform.

Database & data layer. Schema and relationships in .NET Entity Framework, code-first. Migrations versioned, models documented inline. The data model grew from ~10 entities to the full structure visible in the admin today: orders, tourists, diplomats, doctors, packages, lab tests, subscriptions, agents, partners, feedbacks, SIM packages.

Integrations. SendGrid (email + templates + automated marketing flows), Twilio (SMS + appointment reminders + voice automation), Zoom (doctor↔patient video, session links delivered at the right step in the flow), Superpharm (digital prescriptions), Tranzilla (one-off and recurring card payments), SIM carrier API (purchase, top-up, confirmation, receipt).

Admin panel. Built in Retool on top of the existing backend — the business owner's daily cockpit. Eleven sections covering user management (tourists, diplomats, doctors, agents, partners), orders and gross-volume monitoring, doctor-appointment approvals with notification triggers to both patients and doctors, lab test queue, subscription management, doctor packages and SIM packages catalogs, feedback inbox, and a marketing-leads pipeline. Replaced ad-hoc SQL and email threads with one place to run the business.

Server & infrastructure. Azure server maintenance, deploys, secrets management (vaults), file upload handling, uptime monitoring. Logging expanded across the system to make future development debuggable.

Took the system from semi-built to production and kept it running as sole engineer.
‍Shipped two new revenue lines - Lab Tests at Home and Health Service Subscriptions — from data model through customer flow through admin tooling.
‍Owner-to-product translation became repeatable - a workflow of conversation → spec → integration map → migration → ship that turned business ideas into shipped features without a PM in between.