In-House Product
A Publishing Platform Built as a Product, Not a Blog
The site you are reading is also the studio's reference implementation: a full editorial platform with authoring, scheduling, role-based access, and generated social imagery, built on the same stack used for client work.
Independent technology publication · TypeScript · Next.js · React · tRPC
The challenge
Publishing on a hosted platform meant no control over layout, no way to build a distinct editorial identity, and content locked inside someone else's database. The alternative, a static site generator, would have solved presentation but not the editorial workflow: drafts, scheduled publication, multiple contributors, and per-article social imagery all needed to work without touching a repository.
The approach
Rather than treat it as a blog, it was scoped as a small product with two user types: readers, who need fast, indexable, accessible pages, and editors, who need a dashboard that makes publishing routine. That framing drove every decision: content in PostgreSQL rather than files, an authenticated dashboard rather than a CMS dependency, and a design system built on semantic tokens so a second theme cost almost nothing.
What was built
- Editorial dashboard with a draft → scheduled → published → archived workflow
- Scheduled publication handled by a cron-triggered API route, so posts go live without anyone present
- Role-based access control (Reader / Editor / Admin) enforced in middleware and at the API layer
- MDX article rendering with syntax-highlighted code blocks
- Social cards and article headers generated on demand from the post title and summary
- A newspaper design system built on semantic CSS custom properties, giving light and dark themes from one set of components
- Contact and project-brief submissions stored in PostgreSQL and reviewed in the dashboard
Outcome
- Articles are written, scheduled, and published without a deployment
- Every article gets an on-brand social card with no manual image production
- Content is owned outright, in a database that can be migrated or exported at any time
- Server-rendered pages, so articles are indexable without a client-side rendering step
- The same architecture is used as the starting point for client SaaS projects
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