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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
URQL
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