Do-It Engineering Platform
Designed and operated a multi-repo education platform with major build optimization, automated self-hosted delivery, and contributor-safe governance workflows.
Context: Education Platform, Real Production Constraints
Do-It serves engineering students, but the operating constraints were similar to production systems: frequent content updates, many contributors, strict permission boundaries, and a need for reliable deployments during active academic cycles.
Platform Blueprint
I structured the organization as a multi-repo platform:
do-itfor the core site and orchestrationcoursesfor shared academic contentpromo-*repositories for promotion-specific trackscompliance-checkas a reusable GitHub Action quality gate
This made ownership clear and enabled parallel work without constant manual coordination.
High-Leverage Engineering Changes
The largest improvements came from architecture and pipeline work, not cosmetic frontend changes:
- Refactored static generation and asset handling to reduce output from about 1GB to about 20MB.
- Reduced average build time from about 8 minutes to about 1 minute.
- Replaced GitHub Pages dependency with a self-hosted deployment model.
- Added automated workflows for build, compliance checks, and image publishing.
- Introduced cache-aware and submodule-aware CI behavior to keep builds fast and repeatable.
Governance and Access by Design
I treated access management as core platform engineering:
- Built onboarding helpers for student and promotion setup.
- Enforced explicit permission scopes for org, repository, and workflow operations.
- Added policy checks that run before deployment.
- Documented runbooks so maintainers can operate safely without tribal knowledge.
Outcome
The project moved from a heavy, fragile publishing flow to a lean and automated platform that can handle continued contributor growth with lower operational overhead.
Community Signals
Star History
Contributors
Technologies Used
| Icon | Technology | How it was used |
|---|---|---|
 | Eleventy | Static generation engine and content pipeline |
 | Node | Build scripts, helper automation, and compliance tooling |
 | GitHub Actions | Build, compliance, publish, and image release workflows |
 | Docker / GHCR | Versioned deployment image build and distribution |
Project History
Structured the Organization into a Multi-Repo Platform
Organized Do-It as a platform, not a single website: core site, course content repos, promotion repos, and a reusable compliance-check action. This made ownership boundaries clear and enabled parallel contribution workflows.
Re-architected Build and Media Pipeline
Refactored static generation and asset handling to aggressively optimize output size. The build footprint dropped from around 1GB on GitHub Pages to about 20MB for production deployment.
Migrated to Self-Hosted Delivery with Full Automation
Replaced GitHub Pages dependency with self-hosted deployment and automated release workflows. Added image-based deployment pipeline and tag-driven release process to remove manual deployment steps.
Automated Onboarding, Access, and Compliance Controls
Implemented helper scripts for promotion/student onboarding, policy checks, and org-level operations. Enforced permission-aware workflows for repository, workflow, and organization management actions.
Project Details
- Role
- Founder, Maintainer, Platform Engineer
- Client
- Engineering students at Centrale Mediteranee
- Duration
- 1 year
- Published
