Digital Publishing Platform Modernization
Modernized a 16-year-old PHP codebase behind a publishing platform serving roughly 4 million monthly readers, migrating services to containerized AWS deployments with automated CI/CD while daily publishing continued without interruption.
A major metropolitan news organization ran its digital publishing operation on a PHP codebase that had grown for 16 years. The platform served roughly 4 million monthly readers, and any downtime meant missed news cycles and lost subscription revenue.
The work
Over several years I modernized the platform piece by piece: upgrading frameworks, migrating services into containers on AWS, and introducing automated CI/CD pipelines, all while the newsroom published every single day. I designed REST and GraphQL APIs powering the mobile applications, RSS and content feeds, and more than 20 third-party integrations across subscriptions, payments, advertising, analytics, and content syndication.
The outcome
Average page load time dropped from 4.8 seconds to 1.4 seconds through query optimization, indexing, Redis caching, and frontend refactoring. Deployments went from risky manual events to routine automated pipelines, and the platform kept serving millions of readers throughout.