Pixxellent

Pixxellent started as a way to showcase my own photography, something I’ve been shooting on the side for years. The scope kept expanding. It’s now a curated stock-asset platform in private beta, where a closed circle of contributors publish high-resolution work before anything opens to the public. It won’t stop at photos. Video is next, then other digital asset types over time. Curation and community matter more than volume.

I built it solo, top to bottom. Next.js (React, TypeScript) on the frontend, Fastify on Node.js behind it, PostgreSQL as the primary datastore. Redis handles caching. RabbitMQ keeps heavy work off the request path, queuing transactional emails, S3 image tagging, and image processing. GitHub Actions builds Docker images to Amazon ECR, running on ECS.