The App Barista — Coffee Community Platform
My first production system: a Strapi and GraphQL backend powering a coffee community across web and 2 mobile apps — guides, recipes, articles, and games from one API.
- Stack
- Strapi · GraphQL · Node.js · BullMQ · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker
- Links
- Live
The challenge
The App Barista is a community for coffee lovers: brewing guides for methods like AeroPress and Syphon, drink and cocktail recipes, articles on shops and equipment, mini-games, a newsletter, and a "write for us" program for community contributions. It runs on the web and as native iOS and Android apps.
All of it is content — a lot of it, in many shapes — that must be editable by non-developers and served to three different clients from a single backend.
What I engineered
My first project at LOGICWIND — and my induction into how production backend engineering actually works: code review, environments, deployments, and shipping inside an established team.
- A structured content model in Strapi for guides, recipes, articles, and community submissions — the editorial team publishes without ever needing a developer.
- One GraphQL API, three clients. The website and both mobile apps consume the same schema.
- BullMQ background jobs and Redis caching keeping heavy content pages fast.
Architecture
Strapi on Node → PostgreSQL as the content store → exposed over GraphQL to web and mobile → Redis caching and BullMQ background processing → shipped with Docker.
What I took from it
The foundation of everything since — my first production Node and GraphQL system. It taught me how much a headless CMS gives you for free, and exactly where custom engineering has to take over.