Big Brother Junkies

Overview

A community site for Big Brother superfans — live-feed updates, spoilers, episode recaps, player/season archives, and discussion. Headless: Next.js 15 on Vercel for the frontend, a custom WordPress plugin as the read-only API. 100% static, edge-cached, webhook-driven revalidation — built to survive Thursday-night live-show traffic spikes (3,000+ concurrent) for pennies, not dollars.

What I did

Solo design-through-deploy. Built the Next.js frontend top-to-bottom and authored the headless API as a custom WordPress plugin: REST endpoints, JWT + Google OAuth, Stripe & PayPal subscriptions, real-time feed updates with social cross-posting, custom comments. Engineered the caching layer that keeps it cheap at scale — pure on-demand ISR (revalidate: false + tag-scoped webhook invalidation), Cloudflare edge purging, and a strict “no per-request server fetches” discipline so every content page stays statically rendered. Full SEO surface: dynamic season-aware metadata and structured data (BlogPosting, LiveBlogPosting, ProfilePage, TVSeason). Load-tested with k6 at 2,000 concurrent VUs over 15 minutes — 100% cache hit, ~$0.05 serverless cost delta.

Stack

• Next.js 15 · React · Tailwind
• WordPress (headless, custom plugin) · MySQL
• Vercel ISR · Cloudflare
• Stripe · PayPal · Resend · Freestar