ScribeGlobe (Medium-like Blogging site)
A Medium-style blogging platform I built to learn serverless. React + Vite frontend, Hono running on Cloudflare Workers, Postgres for the data.
Preview
Overview
I wanted to build something real to learn serverless and edge computing, so I made a Medium-style blogging platform from scratch. The idea was simple: if I could get a full CRUD app running on Cloudflare Workers with a real database, I'd actually understand how serverless works beyond the marketing pitch. The frontend is React + Vite with TypeScript and Tailwind. Nothing fancy, but it's fast and the DX is great. The interesting part is the backend: I used Hono as the framework running on Cloudflare Workers, which means the API runs at the edge, close to wherever the user is. Postgres handles all the data (users, articles, auth tokens). You can sign up, write posts with markdown, preview them in real time, and publish. The whole thing is typed end-to-end with TypeScript, which caught a ton of bugs before they happened. I also spent a lot of time on the responsive layout since blog content needs to read well on any screen size.
Key Features
Modern Frontend
React + Vite, so hot reloads are instant and the production build is tiny
Serverless Backend
Hono on Cloudflare Workers, so the API runs at the edge and I'm not paying for idle servers
Type Safety
TypeScript everywhere, frontend and backend. Catches most of my dumb mistakes at compile time
Responsive Design
Tailwind CSS for styling. Blog content looks good on phones, tablets, and desktop
Technical Stack
Friction & Takeaways
Friction
- Cloudflare Workers can't hold persistent DB connections, so I had to figure out connection pooling with serverless
- Hono's ecosystem is smaller than Express, so I wrote a few middleware pieces myself
- Getting markdown rendering to look consistent across browsers took more CSS tweaking than I expected
- Auth in a stateless serverless environment meant I couldn't rely on sessions, had to go full JWT
- Debugging Workers locally vs. deployed behaved differently, especially around environment variables
Takeaways
- Serverless isn't magic. You still have to think about cold starts, connection limits, and state management
- TypeScript on both sides of the stack saves a ton of time when you change a data shape
- Hono is a really solid framework for edge APIs. I'd pick it again over Express for Workers
- Building auth from scratch taught me more than any tutorial. JWTs, hashing, token refresh, all of it
- Vite's dev server speed genuinely changes how you build. Going back to Webpack would hurt