History and Architecture Timeline:

• 2019: Joined Spotlight PA as Director of Technology. Started with a simple static site powered by Hugo and called it "Poor Richard" on Netlify. Planned to replace it with a "real site" (Hippogriff - Nuxt in the front and Django out back) but couldn't meet the September launch deadline. Pivoted to using WordPress and Largo (Port Deposit), but the editor didn't like the look. Eventually, "Poor Richard" became the main web presence.
• October: Had one CLI app to check for new stories and post links in Slack, and another to pull down stories from Arc and format them. Almanack was born in late November to manage publishing and share stories with partners. It used a very thin Go backend and Vue frontend. Later, a Heroku Redis instance was added for caching.
• March 2020: Pandemic hit. Closed the Harrisburg office except for one reporter. Traffic increased to six figures. Moved everything to Postgres and removed Redis. Had a number of special projects like the COVID Alerts project. Made changes to the donation page and frontend. Contracted with The New Dynamic to redo the About page.
• 2023: Moved off of Arc as the CMS. Wrote CLIs for importing Google Docs into the CMS. ArchieML was also created by the New York Times for similar purposes.

Key Features and Tools:

• Technologies: Hugo, Netlify, WordPress, Largo, Vue, Nuxt, Django, ESBuild, Tailwind, Alpine.js, Algolia, Imgproxy, Heroku Redis, Heroku Postgres, SendGrid, MailChimp, Google Docs.
• CMS: Arc (initially) and then a system integrated into Almanack that allowed importing from Google Docs.
• Projects: COVID Alerts project, various special projects and interactives.

Current Status and Open Position:

• Spotlight PA's public facing site is a static site supported by dynamic services. Currently has an open position for a Newsroom Developer. If interested in the technical architecture, apply.