Lumina
A cinematic encyclopedia of notable lives, static-first by discipline.
The short version
Every route carries its own first-load JavaScript budget, and a script fails the build when one is exceeded — the cinematic surface is not allowed to cost the reader latency.
No public capture
Eleven phases complete across a monorepo of two applications. The repository is private and is therefore described here but not linked, and there is no public deployment to screenshot.
How Lumina works
An animated encyclopedia of remarkable lives across technology, science, sport, the arts, business and the humanities. A Next.js monorepo with a Sanity editorial workflow, Algolia search, authentication and billed premium tiers — built to the brief "open a page, fall into a life".
The problem
Reference sites are either fast and dull or beautiful and slow. A page that takes four seconds to become readable has not earned its typography, however good the typography is.
The architecture
A pnpm monorepo: a Next.js reader and a Sanity studio. Profile, category, list and article routes all flow through `generateStaticParams` with incremental regeneration. Edge middleware owns exactly three concerns in a fixed order — authentication gating with a real 307, forced 404s for unknown slugs, and locale resolution.
The interesting decision
Performance is a build gate rather than an aspiration. Every route is classified into a tier — homepage, profile, discovery, marketing — with its own first-load JavaScript budget, and a script parses the build output and exits non-zero when a tier is exceeded. GSAP is lazily imported inside the one component that needs it; the connection graph is dynamically imported and mounted on intersection.
What it does now
Thirty-five routes, three locales with per-page hreflang, a sitemap sharded into five files for scale, an editorial audit trail with a publish gate that refuses to publish an uncited chapter, and thirty-eight passing tests.
Worth knowing
- Per-route first-load JavaScript budgets, enforced by a script that fails the build.
- Static-first rendering with incremental regeneration on every content route.
- Edge middleware with three responsibilities in a defined order, so behaviour is predictable.
- A publish gate that refuses to publish a chapter without a citation, a fact-check date and a reviewer.
- A Wikidata importer that drafts profiles and never auto-publishes them.