Producer Battles is a competition platform I designed, engineered, and deployed on my own — from the database schema to the deployed product. It is a real, running application built with Next.js, PostgreSQL, Prisma, and AWS S3, hosted on Vercel.
Every layer of the stack was written and owned by me: the data model, the API, the file upload pipeline, the judging system, and the front-end UI. Nothing was scaffolded from a template or outsourced — this project exists to demonstrate what I can build independently, end to end.
Each technology was chosen deliberately. This is a production-grade stack — not a tutorial build.
App Router with React Server Components for performant server-driven pages, co-located API routes, and seamless Vercel deployment.
Production database hosted on a managed PostgreSQL instance, modeling competitions, submissions, users, and judging records.
Type-safe database access with schema-driven migrations, keeping the data layer consistent across development and production.
Secure, scalable object storage for all producer audio submissions. Files are uploaded directly to S3 via presigned URLs, keeping the server stateless.
Zero-config deployments tied to the main branch. Preview deployments on every pull request for a clean review workflow.
The application covers the full surface area of a production platform — not a prototype, not a demo.
User registration, login, and session management — producers have accounts tied to their competition history.
A data model that tracks bi-weekly competition cycles, rule sets, required samples, submission windows, and judging state.
Producers upload audio directly to AWS S3 via presigned URLs. The server stores only the reference — no binary data hits the API.
Judges score submissions through an internal interface. Scores are aggregated and a winner is resolved programmatically.
Private admin tooling for creating competitions, configuring rule sets, attaching sample audio, and publishing results.
Producer Battles runs bi-weekly music production competitions. Each round, a rule set and a required audio sample are published. Producers submit original compositions that incorporate the sample, then a panel of judges — led by me as founder — selects a winner who receives a cash prize of $25–$50.
Two competitions have already been held on Instagram, drawing 24 total participants through a Meta Ads campaign. The web platform brings the full competition experience online — submissions, judging, and results all managed through the application I built.
“I built Producer Battles to show that I can take an idea from zero to a deployed, working product on my own. The goal was not just to ship something — it was to make engineering decisions that would hold up under real users, real data, and real usage patterns. That means a proper data model, secure file handling, and a deployment pipeline I can trust.”