Full Stack
PrimeTech - A Modern Blog Platform
PrimeTech is a blog platform I built because I wanted a clean writing experience without the bloat of Medium or WordPress. Writers sign up, get a Tiptap-powered rich text editor, and publish articles with code blocks, images, and embeds. Readers get a distraction-free reading mode with a table of contents. The social features — comments and likes — turned out to be the most complex part because of the real-time update requirements.
Project Goals
- Build a writing experience that's faster and cleaner than existing platforms.
- Implement a rich text editor that handles code blocks, images, and embeds without a toolbar overload.
- Add social features (comments, likes) that feel native, not bolted on.
- Make the reading experience focused — no sidebars, no popups, just content.
My Process
Started with the Tiptap editor integration — that was the core feature and the hardest to get right. Built the article schema first, then the API routes for CRUD operations, then the reading UI. The comment system was added last and required the most iteration. Deployed on Vercel with Prisma + PostgreSQL.
Challenges & Solutions
Challenge:
Tiptap's collaborative editing mode conflicted with my optimistic UI updates — cursors would jump and content would duplicate on fast typing.
Solution:
Debounced the cursor sync to 300ms and rebuilt the state reconciliation to use a last-write-wins strategy instead of operational transforms.
Challenge:
Code block syntax highlighting was adding 200ms+ to article render time for posts with many code snippets.
Solution:
Switched to Shiki for code highlighting with on-demand loading — only loads the language grammar when a code block enters the viewport.
Challenge:
The comment system needed real-time updates without polling, but I didn't want to add a WebSocket server.
Solution:
Used Server-Sent Events (SSE) for comment broadcasting — server pushes new comments to all connected readers without the complexity of WebSockets.
Key Learnings
- Rich text editors are deceptively complex — Tiptap is excellent but you need to understand its internals to debug collaboration issues.
- SSE is a perfect fit for read-heavy real-time features like comments — simpler than WebSockets and works through most proxies.
- On-demand code highlighting is a huge perf win for technical blogs — don't load Prism for the whole page when you have 3 code blocks.
Gallery
