Giving for your own good How volunteering improves your career and well being
summary
Volunteering to build the Postgraphy platform produces concrete returns: a live donation site handling €180,000 from 3,500+ donations and 3,000 benefactors, 18 campaigns (6 funded), and 150 volunteers while running Next.js/React frontend, a Go/REST API, PostgreSQL, Keycloak auth, S3-compatible storage, Kubernetes + Rook/Ceph and GitHub Actions CI. Contributors learn operations, security and mentoring, confront scaling spikes from TV-triggered traffic, simplify a prior multi-disciplinary overengineered stack, and avoid premature optimization to ship faster.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Volunteering and open source
- 1:05What is Postgraphy
- 3:51Technical goals and stack
- 6:38Overcomplicated architecture
- 8:03Simplifying the stack
- 9:28Unexpected growth and scalability
- 10:54Current platform status
- 11:36My Postgraphy journey
- 13:00Overcoming contribution doubts
- 14:43Learning and mentoring
- 16:06Dealing with burnout
- 18:34Tools powering the platform
- 20:18Volunteering takeaways
- 22:26Simplicity and optimization
- 23:12Call to action
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