Buildings are responsible for a large share of global emissions, and most owners have little visibility into where their portfolio actually stands. As a freelance engineer I worked with Predium on exactly that problem: a platform that helps real estate companies understand their environmental footprint, plan renovations, and cut cost while doing it. It is the rare project where good engineering and a worthwhile outcome point in the same direction.
A typed path from database to UI
The backbone of the product is a GraphQL API built on Hasura, Prisma, and PostgreSQL, and that combination did a lot of heavy lifting. Hasura’s CLI and real-time capabilities let us move quickly without hand-writing resolvers for every read. Prisma handled migrations and the more involved SQL, and — just as importantly — generated TypeScript types we could trust end to end.
Types that flow from the schema to the UI quietly remove a whole class of bugs you’d otherwise find in production.
That single typed contract, from the database through the API to a React frontend, is what kept a fast-moving codebase from drifting into guesswork.
Structure on the backend
For the service layer we chose NestJS over a bare Express server. The appeal is its architectural opinionatedness: modules, dependency injection, and clear boundaries that hold up as the surface area grows. Express is fine for something small, but on a platform that keeps accreting features, the structure NestJS imposes pays for itself in maintainability.
Frontend and infrastructure
The interface is React 18 with Material UI — tools I have used extensively, which let us ship a modern, responsive experience without reinventing the basics. Everything runs on AWS, which continues to earn its place through reliability and breadth, and gave the team room to scale operations securely.
Why it works
The real multiplier was the team: small, agile, and genuinely committed to the mission. A project-oriented mindset and a shared sense of purpose meant technical decisions stayed close to real-world impact. Sustainability and solid engineering are not at odds — here they reinforced each other, one building at a time.