Personal Site: Engineering and Operational Choices
This page documents how mmaitland.dev handles contact submissions, optional admin access, and content delivery - the same problems as any small production site, with choices tuned for one maintainer and low operational overhead.
Architecture artifact
Sketch of the contact path and optional admin persistence - useful for keeping assumptions explicit when iterating alone.
What runs in production
Server-side Zod validation for contact and waitlist before side effects
Honeypot field plus Upstash sliding-window rate limiting on contact submissions
GitHub OAuth via Auth.js for admin routes and inbox views when configured
Optional Prisma persistence for contact and waitlist records after email sends
Playwright smoke tests on public routes, titles, and OG metadata
Tradeoffs
Managed services over custom infrastructure
Used Resend, Upstash, and Neon-backed Prisma integration to reduce ops burden and improve reliability during solo iteration.
Delivery first, then persistence
Contact action treats email delivery as the primary success path, with inbox persistence as best-effort to avoid silent form success when mail is misconfigured.
Small, reviewable changes
Incremental PRs and merge gates so fixes stay easy to reason about instead of landing as one large batch.
