programaConNosotros: Building the Platform for a Community We Co-Founded

For its first four years, programaConNosotros ran entirely on WhatsApp and Discord. Events, talks, courses, job postings, and the community's own history lived in chat scrollback — real, valuable, and almost impossible to find again once it scrolled past. A newcomer had no single place to see what the community was, let alone join it.

The original brief in 2024 was modest: build an institutional website. But a static site doesn't solve the actual problem — a chat log isn't an archive, and a community that only exists in group chats has no durable home. What the community actually needed was a place it could own: a platform members could log into, contribute to, and grow through, not just a page that describes it from the outside.

The scope grew accordingly. What started as a brochure site became a full social platform with member accounts — profiles, notifications, likes and comments on advice posts, a member directory. Every event, talk, course, and testimonial now lives in a database instead of a chat thread, searchable and permanent.

The more consequential decision was to build the platform itself as a community project. It's open source, and any member can contribute — which means the platform is also the community's own training ground: engineers who've never shipped production code get to work in a real Next.js/Postgres codebase, open real pull requests, and build a public GitHub history, reviewed and merged by their peers.

The stack is Next.js 16 on the App Router with Server Actions instead of a REST layer — the same pattern we use at DIZENZ — backed by Postgres through Prisma: 25 models and 53 migrations covering everything from events and talk proposals to community-built software projects.

Auth is hand-rolled rather than bolted on: bcrypt-hashed passwords, database-backed sessions behind an httpOnly cookie, and rate-limited, time-boxed codes for email verification and password resets. User uploads go straight from the browser to S3 via presigned URLs and are served through CloudFront, and the whole thing deploys itself — Kamal pushes new builds to a self-managed AWS box behind Let's Encrypt on every merge to main, rather than handing that off to a PaaS.

One bug is a good example of the kind of detail this scale of project runs into. Event flyers are 4-5MB photos straight from a phone, and WhatsApp silently drops a link preview once the image crosses roughly 600KB-1MB — so shared event links were rendering the community logo instead of the actual flyer. The fix was to route every flyer through Next's own image optimizer before handing the URL to social crawlers, producing a resized, scraper-friendly og:image on the fly instead of pointing at the raw upload.

Because the whole codebase is open to contributors working in parallel, the dev environment had to scale with them: every git worktree gets its own isolated Postgres database, spun up and seeded automatically, so two people — or two AI agents — can work on unrelated features at the same time without stepping on each other's data.

The platform now covers more than 30 routes across the community's full activity:

The platform has been in continuous development since 2024, built and reviewed the way we'd build any production product: