(Brand name, roughly translates to “Safe Dimension”)
A hazmat placard business, serving the hazardous materials transportation sector
In addition to the e-commerce platform built on WordPress + WooCommerce, I designed a data infrastructure to centralize Mexican hazmat regulatory information through automated scraping, relational modeling, and a private API for structured queries regarding hazardous materials.
Why?
The project initially began as an e-commerce platform specializing in hazmat signs and placards, but the need arose to structure regulatory information to automate queries, classifications, and relationships between materials.
Information on hazardous materials in Mexican regulations is often scattered across multiple documents, PDF tables, and references that are difficult to consult in practice.
This led to the design of a centralized database and an API-style access layer to support future internal tools and processes.
Architecture
The platform combines several components:
- WordPress + WooCommerce for the blog and e-commerce management.
- Python and BeautifulSoup for scraping and processing regulatory information from official federal resources.
- MySQL for relational modeling of the hazardous materials, classifications and regulatory references.
- PHP for customizations and Server-Side Rendering UI components.
- Internal REST-style endpoints for structured data queries.
- A Flask app for handling API-style requests, deployed on a separate server, physically isolated from the main website server.
One of the main challenges was transforming semi-structured information from various regulatory sources into a consistent and reusable model.
Technical challenges
Data scraping was one of the project’s main challenges due to inconsistencies across different sources and regulatory formats.
Part of the work involved standardizing nomenclatures, identifying redundant relationships, and designing transformation rules to maintain consistency in the database.
Challenges also arose related to relational design, particularly when representing multiple classifications and cross-references between materials, labels, and regulations.
At the application level, integrating custom components into WordPress without breaking compatibility with WooCommerce required carefully separating business logic from visual components.
Results and learning
Although the project ultimately ended up being a side business, it enabled the development of a reusable infrastructure for querying and managing hazmat information.
Technically, the project provided hands-on experience in data automation, relational design, systems integration, and full-stack development on a real-world business platform.
It also underscored the importance of designing systems with maintainability and data quality in mind from the earliest stages.