Dev builds secure government portal, nearly loses project over compliance rules

A software developer shared their experience building an internal information portal for law enforcement agencies, intended to aggregate regulations, orders, and personal document management. The project initially used a standard React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL stack, but hit a major roadblock in the third week when the client's security team revealed strict on-premise requirements and a restricted list of approved software. This forced the developer to abandon automated CI/CD pipelines in favor of manually packaged update archives controlled entirely by the client's system administrators. Additional constraints included banning tokens from localStorage, eliminating personal data from logs, and simplifying the UI for infrequent users who needed to find documents in two clicks or fewer. A last-minute terminology audit — replacing words like 'user' with 'employee' across the codebase — was resolved quickly thanks to an early decision to centralize all UI text in a single localization file.