A Two-Sided Platform, Built and Run by One Engineer
NearImpact connects community organisations with the people who need them — and I built, shipped and host every piece of it myself.
Community opportunities tend to scatter — across social feeds, mailing lists and word of mouth — and the people without networks are the ones who miss them. NearImpact gathers them in one place: organisations publish structured opportunities; participants discover them by list or map, apply, and track their status.
Under the hood it is an end-to-end TypeScript system — a Next.js front end and a separate Express API speaking a consistent {data, error} contract. Authentication runs through a self-hosted Keycloak with role-based access control; data lives in PostgreSQL with trigram full-text search; and a gpt-4o-mini recommendation engine ranks opportunities without sending personal data to the model.
Most telling is the operations story. I did not hand the application to a managed platform — I run it: five Docker containers behind a Caddy reverse proxy with automatic TLS, on a single low-cost server, with security you can verify directly in the response headers.
Built with: TypeScript · Next.js · Express · Keycloak · PostgreSQL · MapLibre GL · Docker · OpenAI