Viet Up

Viet Up is a non-profit that creates space for young people of Vietnamese origin in the Czech Republic — networking events, Vietnamese language courses, the Vietnam Day Festival (previously Banana Fest), and integration work across generations. I am involved with the association myself, and I built its website and the backoffice behind it.

What the site has to do

The public site carries two different kinds of content. Events and programme information change constantly and are run by people who are not developers. The Viet Kieu stories — personal accounts submitted by the community — arrive from a public form and need review before anything is published. So the site could not be a static brochure: the association had to be able to edit and moderate its own content without asking me.

Build

The frontend is Next.js and the backend is Spring Boot, the same split I use on most of my own projects. The backend owns the content model, the story submissions and the editorial state; Next.js renders the public pages against it.

Public pages are statically generated and revalidated, so an editor's change in the backoffice reaches the live site without a rebuild or a developer involved.

Submitted Viet Kieu stories arrive through the public form, are reviewed by the Viet Up team in the backoffice, and only go live once approved; the form carries spam protection.

Backoffice

The site ships with an admin application where the Viet Up team edits the submitted Viet Kieu stories and manages site content directly, without a developer in the loop.

The site is bilingual, serving its content in both Czech and Vietnamese.

I built the site mostly on my own; today it is maintained by me and one other person.