I built SODAX Terminal across three sessions over about a month. It's a professional trading terminal with cross-network swaps, tokenized equities, limit orders, lending and borrowing, staking, leverage-yield vaults, a cross-network portfolio, and live protocol analytics. 3,648 lines of app code, 38 SDK hooks, 21 chains in config, 28 money-market reserves live.
The goal was specific: a viewer thinks "this looks like a real product I'd deposit into" and a builder thinks "I could ship this."
Session one was 37 minutes. Scaffold to working product with analytics, trading, earn, and portfolio tabs. About five minutes per major feature area. The ordering mattered: analytics came first because it needs no wallet. The app is useful and demonstrable before a single connection exists. Every tab after that layered onto something that already worked.
Session two is the better story because it starts with the build being thrown out. The first version had 2,500 lines of hand-written CSS, a DIY dropdown/modal/token-picker, and a hand-drawn SVG chart. The feedback was blunt: it looks cheap. The diagnosis: the design decisions were fine, the problem was hand-rolling things that have well-built libraries. Bespoke primitives miss the details that read as quality: focus traps, portalling, keyboard semantics, tooltip engines. No amount of restyling fixes that. So it got rebuilt on Tailwind v4, shadcn/ui on Base UI, TanStack Table, and ECharts. Same afternoon.
