The Forest

I architected and built The Forest (theforest.church), a fast, search-first church website for my congregation. The app is powered by SvelteKit, TypeScript, PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM, and MUX for video streaming, with Stripe integrated for donations. I designed a separate metadata store for sermons—linked to MUX assets—to drive an advanced, faceted query experience (filter by series, speaker, scripture range, topics, and more) that returns results instantly and scales cleanly. Throughout, I focused on developer-friendly domain models, typed endpoints, and cache-aware queries to keep the UI responsive under load.

I’m actively extending the platform with a custom interactive transcript system that lets viewers jump to exact timestamps by clicking words (prototype live at /test/transcript) and a headless blog sourced from Hashnode via GraphQL. Thanks to careful vendor selection and infra choices, total hosting costs remain under $5/month. An iOS/Android companion app is in progress, likely using Tauri (Rust) to reuse the web codebase while delivering native performance and offline-first reading for sermons and notes.