Arkansas Honeyworks
About Arkansas Honeyworks
Arkansas Honeyworks is a family-owned beekeeping supply store in Benton, Arkansas, opened by my brother Brach Williams. The shop serves backyard beekeepers and commercial operators across the region with hive equipment, protective gear, tools, and local honey—and it doubles as an educational hub, publishing guides and seasonal articles that help new beekeepers get started.
About The Project
Mission: My brother had been wanting to learn Claude Code, so I sent him a free trial and offered to walk him through his very first real software project. He happened to need a website for his brand-new retail business, so we decided the project would be exactly that—a full greenfield e-commerce and content platform for Arkansas Honeyworks, built hands-on together from an empty directory to a live store. He learned Claude Code by actually shipping something real; he got a production website for his business; and I got to build something for family.
Technologies Used: Laravel 13, Vue 3 with Inertia.js 2 (SSR enabled), Tailwind CSS 3, Filament 5 for the admin panel, MySQL 8, DigitalOcean (Ubuntu, Nginx, PHP-FPM, Let's Encrypt), Google OAuth via Laravel Socialite, MailerLite for newsletter subscribers, TinyPNG for automatic image optimization, Sentry for error tracking, rclone for automated Google Drive backups, and Claude Code as the day-to-day pair programmer throughout the build.
Links
- Arkansas Honeyworks Website
- Laravel docs
- Vue.js docs
- Inertia.js docs
- Filament docs
- Tailwind CSS docs
- Vite docs
- Laravel Socialite
- MailerLite
- TinyPNG API
- DigitalOcean
- Sentry
- GSAP
- Claude Code
Live Site: arkansashoneyworks.com
Summary
This project doubled as onboarding to AI-assisted development for my brother. Brach drove the work in Claude Code day-to-day—writing prompts, reviewing diffs, running migrations, and learning the Laravel and Vue ecosystem by actually shipping code. I sat in on the harder pieces (architecture decisions, server-side rendering, Google OAuth, the deploy pipeline, provisioning his DigitalOcean droplet), reviewed his work, and kept him unblocked when Claude went sideways. It was the most rewarding kind of mentoring: teaching by building something real, for someone I love, that's now live and making money for his family.
The platform itself is a full modern stack—Laravel 13 on the backend with Vue 3 and Inertia.js (SSR enabled) on the frontend, a custom Filament 5 admin panel for products, articles, subscribers, and users, Google OAuth for one-click admin login, and a MailerLite-synced newsletter signup flow. Brach can refresh his inventory by dropping a CSV export from his point-of-sale system into the admin panel, publish educational articles to the Resources hub, and manage everything without touching code.
Because he's a first-time business owner on a tight budget, the whole thing runs on a single inexpensive DigitalOcean droplet—no recurring SaaS fees. I set up nightly automated backups to Google Drive via rclone, automatic image optimization through TinyPNG so his phone photos don't wreck page load, a local-build deploy pipeline (make deploy) that runs tests and builds assets on my machine before anything touches production, and a Claude Code audit suite (/optimize, /design-audit, /security-audit, /seo-audit, /mobile-audit, /content-review) so he can keep the site healthy on his own going forward. He learned Claude Code hands-on; he got a production website; and the business has a real home on the internet.