A full-stack community platform where readers form groups, track their reading progress, and discuss books together, built with a modern TypeScript stack and a managed backend. Irrational Reading is a book club I started with a few friends. I built this application to manage our discussion groups, reading plans, polls, newsletter, and book reviews in one place instead of juggling spreadsheets and email tools.
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Landing page showing a simple sign up form.The community page shows a list of reading groups and stats.My Groups page showing a list of groups I am a member of.Club Book page showing a list of books and stats.Admin Dashboard page showing a list of users and admin actions.Managing a group's members and books.
Challenges
Balancing a real book club’s simple needs against a much larger platform feature set.
Modeling complex relationships between users, clubs, books, reading groups, polls, reviews, and subscriptions.
Handling authentication and email edge cases across OAuth providers, verification flows, and transactional notifications.
Approach
Built a full-stack Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and Prisma application with server-side rendering.
Created role-based administration for members, group admins, and platform-level moderation.
Integrated OAuth authentication, AWS SES email notifications, reading plans, polls, reviews, and supporter tiers into one system.
Outcomes
Delivered a working platform for managing reading groups, progress tracking, discussions, reviews, and club administration.
Gained deeper experience with relational data modeling, access control, authentication, and subscription logic.
Learned an important product lesson: validate actual user needs early and keep scope aligned with the group’s real workflow.