Build idea · Intermediate
A changelog & roadmap site
Turn "what did you ship?" into a page you never have to update by hand.
A public two-in-one site: a chronological changelog of what you've shipped and a roadmap board where users upvote what to build next. The core feature is the loop between them — flip a roadmap card to "Shipped" and it auto-drafts a changelog entry, then emails everyone who upvoted that item.
What you'll learn
- →Modeling related data — entries, roadmap items, votes, subscribers — and querying it type-safely instead of hand-writing SQL strings
- →Splitting one deployment into a public read-only site and an auth-gated admin dashboard where only you can post
- →Rendering user-authored Markdown into styled, SEO-friendly pages without opening an XSS hole
- →Sending transactional email on an event (a ship) and tracking who was already notified so nobody gets pinged twice
Take it further
- +Expose an RSS/Atom feed and a small JSON API so other tools — and your own product's in-app 'What's New' widget — can pull the latest entries
- +Let signed-in users comment on roadmap cards, with rate limiting so it doesn't turn into a spam board
- +Ship an embeddable widget (a script tag or React component) that drops the newest changelog entry straight into your actual product