Luminary: Week 2 — Building the Core

Source: Dev.to

What is Luminary

Luminary is an open‑source platform created to celebrate and recognize women for their achievements and contributions to society. The platform aims to highlight women making an impact across different fields, giving them a place where their work can be acknowledged, discovered, and shared with a wider audience.

The project is being built collaboratively by contributors across multiple roles—including frontend, backend, and design—with a focus on creating a scalable and accessible recognition platform.

What I Worked on This Week

This week my work focused largely on maintaining the codebase and building core backend infrastructure. As the Lead Maintainer, part of my responsibility is ensuring the project remains stable and contributor‑friendly while also stepping in where technical gaps exist. I also filled in as the Backend Lead, helping to establish the foundational backend architecture for the platform.

Main Tasks

• Set up and configured the initial deployment for the project website →
• Began building the backend service for Luminary
• Refactored sections of the codebase to support proper deployment and project structure
• Implemented API endpoints for:
  • Submitting a nomination for a woman
  • Searching through the nominated women directory
• Designed and structured the database schemas required for the nomination system
• Coordinated repository maintenance tasks to keep the project organized and contributor‑friendly

Technical Implementation Breakdown

The Luminary backend follows a Node.js + Express architecture, providing a RESTful API layer that communicates with a PostgreSQL database managed through Supabase.

Frontend

• Static site deployed on Netlify
• Displays nominee profiles and handles nomination submissions

Backend

• Node.js server using Express
• Handles API requests, nomination submissions, and directory queries
• Acts as middleware between the frontend and database

Database

• PostgreSQL managed through Supabase
• Stores nomination records, nominator information, and nominee profiles

Database Design

To support the nomination workflow, schemas were designed for three main entities:

Nominee (Woman)

• Name
• Field or area of contribution
• Biography or impact description
• Additional metadata related to recognition

Nominator

• Information about the individual submitting the nomination
• Enables tracking and potential moderation workflows

Nomination

• Links a nominator to a nominee
• Captures details about the achievement or impact being recognized

Challenges I Encountered

A primary technical challenge involved deployment issues with Netlify. The project originally placed index.html inside a pages directory, preventing Netlify from detecting the entry point. Since Netlify expects the entry HTML file at the root of the published directory, the deployment failed.

Resolution:
Refactored the application structure by moving index.html to the base level of the project and updating the directory layout. This allowed Netlify to correctly identify the entry point, resulting in a cleaner, deployment‑friendly structure.

What I Learned This Week

• Handling deployment constraints when hosting static frontends
• Managing project stability while coordinating contributions as a Lead Maintainer

Team & Contributors

Luminary is a collaborative effort with many contributors:

• Isaac Shosanya — Lead Maintainer
• Ramnan Ramyil — Project Lead
• Awoyemi Abiola — Project Lead
• Daniel Chisom — Engineering Lead
• Micheal Omonedo — Design Lead
• Ariyo Taiwo — UI/UX Designer

Collaboration has been key to moving the project forward, and it’s exciting to see the platform gradually take shape.