NASA Earth Observatory

Problem

• → Routine stories still needed custom engineering — brittle, one-off publishing patterns made editorial velocity a queue, not a system.
• → Traffic and imagery volume exposed performance, accessibility, and SEO debt that could not be patched story-by-story.
• → Distributed content teams lacked a shared workflow — engineering had become the bottleneck for science communication at scale.

Decisions

• → Standardize on repeatable story templates and a shared publishing model instead of per-story builds — accept slower net-new features to unlock editorial self-service.
• → Treat large imagery, metadata consistency, and non-engineer workflows as first-class pipeline concerns, not afterthoughts bolted onto the CMS.
• → Gate releases on frontend performance, accessibility, and search discoverability so public science traffic and WCAG expectations stay non-negotiable.

Outcome

• → Editors ship routine stories without waiting on custom engineering — throughput became a product of the system, not heroics.
• → High-traffic public science audience got a stronger performance and accessibility baseline.
• → Left a maintainable foundation for ongoing Earth science communication instead of another round of one-off platform debt.

Team & leadership

Leadership mode

Tech lead / sticky IC across platform engineering and editorial partners

Team & partners

~4 engineers and content partners on a flagship site serving 1.5M+ monthly visitors

What I unblocked

Moved story production off one-off engineering work so editors could ship without waiting on custom builds.

Hard decision

Traded short-term feature velocity for a shared publishing model — fewer heroics per story, higher long-term throughput.