This is not your typical portfolio entry.
During a quieter consulting period, I took the opportunity to modernize the infrastructure behind daMusic.
The platform originally consisted of a collection of handwritten Node.js scripts that generated static HTML, served from a very simple server. Alongside it lived a legacy PHP backend that editors used to review, correct and publish articles, and to coordinate the work of the editorial team.
I migrated the platform to Strapi with a Next.js frontend and integrated Plausible Analytics.
Today the site serves around 20,000 unique visitors per month and hosts more than 35,000 articles accumulated over twenty-one years.
Beyond the migration itself, I developed custom Strapi plugins to support editorial workflows, built webhooks that automate social media publishing, and created maintenance scripts to keep the platform running smoothly. The entire infrastructure runs on Hetzner servers.
There is still plenty to improve. SEO can be better, I am building a concert discovery crawler, and the Flickr integration used by our photographers could be more seamless.
I still tend to think of daMusic as a hobby project. But maintaining a publishing platform with decades of content, thousands of monthly readers and a team of contributors increasingly feels like running a small software product.