JesusFilm Project (via Cru)

What I worked on

A core engineer on the open-source JesusFilm/core monorepo since late 2021, with nearly 1,000 merged pull requests across the platform. The work centers on the NextSteps visual-journey product (nextstep.is and its admin authoring tool) and the jesusfilm.org/watch video library, on top of the federated GraphQL backend, authentication, and infrastructure that power them. Next.js (app router) on the front, a federated GraphQL API on the back, deployed to Vercel and AWS via Terraform.

Wins

• Drove the migration to a modern, federated GraphQL architecture — stood up api-journeys-modern and the Hive/Yoga api-gateway, and ported the block, button, icon, chat, and journey mutations off the legacy graph.
• Migrated the data layer off ArangoDB to Postgres / Prisma, building the ArangoDB→BigQuery ETL that kept analytics intact through the cutover.
• Designed the authentication and identity model for the modern API: authenticated and anonymous user types, an auth user union, and anonymous-journey capture with transfer-on-sign-up.
• Built journey-authoring features in the NextSteps admin — quick-start templates, custom-domain support, and AI-assisted translation using the OpenRouter AI SDK.
• Wired up analytics and reporting: Plausible journey-stats aggregation and Google Sheets event sync/export for non-technical teams.
• Contributed to the JesusFilm Watch video library, including Algolia search over the Arclight catalog.
• Modernized the platform's tooling — Terraform→OpenTofu (with Atlantis PR automation), Jest→Vitest test migrations, and Node upgrades across the monorepo.

Tech

Next.js, TypeScript, GraphQL (federated — Hive / Yoga), Node.js, Postgres, Prisma, ArangoDB, BigQuery, Algolia, Firebase Auth, AWS, Terraform / OpenTofu, Vercel, Vitest.