Day 4 — the building blocks

Boring infrastructure days that pay back forever, if you do them right.

Most of today went into setup that nobody will ever see directly but that everything else gets built on. shadcn/ui installed using the Nova preset. Tailwind configuration extended with the brand palette I'm going with — Paddock Green as the dominant dark, Dune Sand as the warm light, Linen as the neutral background, Midnight for body copy. (Naming color tokens after things that actually exist in a barn was a deliberate move — every time I open the Tailwind config I'm reminded who I'm building for.)

Pulled in the core component library: Button, Input, Label, Card, Badge, Table, Dialog, Form, Select, Textarea. None of them are doing anything interesting yet — just sitting in packages/ui/ waiting to be composed. The shared sidebar nav got drawn with role-based routing scaffolding (manager / trainer / client), and the login page got upgraded from the default starter shell to something that actually looks like a product.

The decision I'm most happy with from this week is one that came from a different industry: don't build the desktop layout first and bolt on mobile later. Trainers will use this on phones in the barn aisle. Clients will check bookings while in the carpool line. Every page that gets built from here on has to look right at 390px before it ships at 1280. Cheaper now than later.

Tomorrow: the manager dashboard scaffolding starts. Lots of empty rooms in the building, but the building plans are real.