Young Artist Community
Community-maintained directory and review platform for Young Artist Programs in classical music and opera. Browse, filter, review, and contribute program data, Wikipedia-style. AI-powered scraping pipeline for keeping listings current.
A directory and review platform for Young Artist Programs in classical music and opera, built from personal experience on both sides of the table: as a singer who auditioned for these programs, and as an engineer who automated the admin behind one.
What It Does
Program directory. Browse and filter programs by instrument, category, location, tuition, scholarship availability, and application deadline. Slug-based URLs and cursor pagination throughout.
Reviews. Read and submit alumni reviews with star ratings, year attended, and written feedback. The reviews that exist informally in Facebook groups and word of mouth, collected in one searchable place.
Wikipedia-style editing. Anyone can create a program, edit any field, or submit audition details. No account required. Every edit creates a versioned snapshot for rollback. A report system handles inaccurate data or inappropriate content.
AI import pipeline. A multi-stage scraping system fetches program websites, extracts structured data via Claude Haiku 4.5, and queues candidates for human review. Content hash diffing skips unchanged pages. Gzipped HTML storage allows re-extraction without re-fetching. 27 import sources across 11 programs, running monthly via Vercel Cron.
Technical Approach
API-first development: an OpenAPI 3.0.3 spec (~1,200 lines) was the first file committed. The API follows Zalando RESTful Guidelines pragmatically (snake_case, sub-resources, RFC 9457 errors, cursor pagination). Next.js 16 with async server components querying Prisma 7 directly. Neon serverless PostgreSQL. Tailwind CSS v4 with a swappable palette system (five named themes in CSS custom properties). Zod 4 validates both LLM extraction output and form submissions.
72 commits, roughly 21.5 hours. The speed came from upfront system design: ER diagram, OpenAPI spec, and API conventions decided before implementation began.