Papeleta Style - Private Barber Studio in the Bronx

Project Overview:

Papeleta Style is Marino Martínez's private barber studio on East 135th Street in Mott Haven. It isn't a barbershop in the usual sense: one chair, one client at a time, no walk-ins, no waiting area. You pick the music, there's valet parking, and the top of the menu comes with a glass of Moët. He also does house calls anywhere in the city.

That's a premium, appointment-only experience, and a stranger has no way of knowing that from a Booksy listing. The site had to make the case for the price before anyone saw it, carry Marino's story and his Dominican roots, and get someone from "who is this" to a booked chair in as few taps as possible.

Approach & Process:

Built as a single, hand-written static page. No framework, no build step, just fast HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. A few decisions came straight from how Marino actually runs the studio:

Sell the room before the menu. The page opens on the studio itself ("not a barbershop, a private room built around one chair") so that by the time you hit a $150 cut, you already understand what you're paying for.
Every service books itself. The menu is split into Classic, Prestige, and Signature tiers, and each "Book this" button deep-links straight to that exact service in Square Appointments. No landing on a generic booking page and hunting for the right option.
English and Spanish, one toggle. This is a Bronx studio run by a Dominican barber, so Spanish couldn't be an afterthought. The whole page switches languages in place, and the Dominican pride section keeps its Spanish either way.
Proof is borrowed, not invented. The 5.0 rating links back to his real Booksy reviews, before-and-after shots show the actual work, and a reel section pulls his Instagram clips in, because his following is where the trust already lived.
Built to be found. Structured data marks the page up as a hair salon, with the full menu, FAQs, hours, the address, and a booking action, so search engines understand it as a real local business and not just another page.

Outcome & Impact:

The site shipped and is live at papeletastyle.com.

Questions I get a lot.

Why go back for a CS degree if you were already making six figures?

Because the work had already outrun the paperwork, and I was tired of that gap. I’d walked away from two schools already — Baruch didn’t even offer a CS degree, and by BMCC I was already writing production code, so sitting through intro classes for a piece of paper felt backwards. I enrolled at WGU in 2024, kept the full-time engineering job, and finished the B.S. in August 2026. Third school. First degree, eight years later than the “normal” path. I wanted the foundation, and I wanted to close a loop I’d left open twice.

How did you get hired without a degree?

I showed work. The first scripts were for my dad’s business in 2017, automating the data entry that was eating his week. Columbia’s coding bootcamp gave me three months of full-stack JavaScript and a cohort in 2019 — a program that doesn’t even exist anymore. PLNETWORKS hired me in 2020 on a portfolio, not a diploma. After that, each role was about what I’d already shipped: production bugs, HIPAA software, storefronts. The degree came eight years later. It didn’t open the first door.

What actually moved your career forward?

In January 2022 I took a contract-to-hire role through Cazton and treated every day like an audition. Ten months later the client, BrightInsight, converted me to full time, and I spent the next few years building HIPAA-regulated software before joining Thesis in 2025. Same skills, different rooms. The market paid for proof. I treated interviews like case studies of work I’d already done, not like a plea for a first chance.

Where are you from, and where are you now?

I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. First thirteen years in a tiny attic apartment. I live in Hell’s Kitchen now. The city didn’t get bigger. I just moved west of the same story.

How do you actually use Cursor and Claude?

As a tutor and a pair, not as a ghostwriter. I still read the diff. I still throw away the parts that look clever and aren’t. The tools make the boring parts faster so I can spend the hours on the decisions that have to be mine.

What would you tell someone learning to code right now?

Build something your family can use. Put it in public. Don’t wait for a school to bless the start. I dropped out twice, then finished. Both of those were the right call at the time.