gustavo.is

a group blogging platform.

Contributions: client development, server development and devOps.

Inception and Purpose

Founded in early 2019 by Kristen Pavle, Dave Gorum and me (Gustavo Gallegos), Ponder was a blogging platform focused on simplicity aimed at people that wanted to publish a blog collaboratively.

We built a product where friends could create content together, have private discussions and publish their work to the web.

We worked hard to design a product that would promote meaningful content and meaningful discussions as a small counterbalance to pervailing social media trends.

Lessons learned

Utility is paramount.

Although finding my co-founders was not only unexpected but also quick, the process of distilling our purpose and ideas into a cohesive product plan took some time. Refining the market need and its proposed solution must happen as soon as humanly possible to begin testing your assumptions. The details of establishing a company and its principles can be a small side project or postponed in favor of small, incremental rounds of development to test utility in order to validate the product idea.

Technologies and Integrations

Client Framework

React

📄 React SPA

📦 Bundled with Parcel

🪝 Modern hook-based architecture

Graphql Client

Urql

🕊 Lightweight GraphQL client

🏪 Normalized cache

🔒 Homegrown auth exchange

⚡️ Subscriptions for real time notifications

Graph Database

Neo4J Aura

🔌 Cypher resolvers for complex queries

💾 Simple analytics scripts

💫 Cypher graphql directive for simple queries

Client Hosting/Deployment

Vercel

📡 SPA Client deployment

🔧 Utility lambda functions (JS)

🌎 Domain management

Server & Media Hosting

DigitalOcean

🏚 GraphQL server hosting

👯‍♂️ Production, development and staging environments

📦 AWS S3 compatible storage

GraphQL Server

Apollo GraphQL Server

🔑 JWT expiration/refresh auth

💫 authentication directives

🗞 PubSub based subscriptions for real time notifications

💅

CSS in JS Library

Styled-Components

📄 CSS-in-JS to power Dave Gorum's beautiful design

🤝

Services used

Integrations

📧 Postmark (email notifications)

📈 Segment (analytics)

🌄 Unsplash (photos)

💾 DigitalOcean (storage)

🪳 Sentry (exception reporting)

Feature Showcase

👉🏼 Chatlog-style blog post authoring

👉🏼 Optimistic updates

👉🏼 Continuous auto-save

👉🏼 Independent inputs can be reordered, edited or deleted

👉🏼 Images can be uploaded via file upload or drag and drop

👉🏼 Unlimited image uploads

👉🏼 Images stored in DigitalOcean Spaces via AWS S3 driver