What I built.
Built the site and its CMS solo, end to end
Sole engineer: the public site, the admin, the data model, the deploy — all of it. Astro 5 in SSR mode with islands of Preact (compat) hydrated only where the page is actually interactive.
A tiny self-hosted CMS on Prisma + SQLite
Nine Prisma models (works and photos, reviews, formats, FAQ, locations, editable site texts, leads, the admin user) back a CMS small enough to run from a single SQLite file, with no SaaS in the loop.
Custom auth from scratch
A signed-JWT session in an httpOnly cookie via jose, bcrypt-hashed credentials, a rate-limited login, and a middleware guard over every /admin and /api/admin route. No auth library, no third party.
~28KB of gzipped HTML with the CSS inlined
Critical CSS is inlined to kill the render-blocking request, so the whole document arrives in roughly 28KB gzipped and paints without waiting on a stylesheet round-trip.
Cut the request chains Lighthouse hated
Disabled the modulepreload hints that chained Base → preload-helper → Lenis, and load the smooth-scroll library on first interaction instead, so nothing non-essential blocks the critical path.
A real image pipeline
sharp generates responsive AVIF/WebP variants with blur-up placeholders, and the LCP hero image is preloaded over HTTP headers so it starts downloading before the HTML is even parsed.
SSR straight to SQLite
The public site reads SQLite on every request, so an edit in the admin is live instantly with no ISR cache to bust, while lazy-hydrated islands keep the JS that ships tiny.
Eight sections, all hers to edit
Works, reviews, FAQ, pricing formats, locations, the site's own texts, leads and the account — a full dashboard, not a developer's escape hatch.
Drag-to-reorder and photo upload
Reorder works and reviews by dragging (sortablejs), toggle what shows on the home page, and upload photos that are processed server-side through sharp on the way in.
Even the copy is content
The marketing text on the public site is stored as editable site-text keys, so she can rewrite her own headlines without a deploy.
Dockerized with a real CI pipeline
GitLab CI runs lint → typecheck → build → image → smoke → deploy, and the prod server is Express with gzip and year-long cache headers for assets, behind Caddy.
Lead-gen automation
A Telegram bot (grammy) drives the PDF-freebie funnel and notifies on new leads, with a VK integration (vk-io) on top for outreach.
What the site does.
Built for Photography, Personal brand & portfolio.
Live client site. The admin screenshots run on seeded demo content — no real leads or personal data are shown.