At 08:58, the daily workflow starts with a local timezone-aware clock.
America/Toronto
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A school day,
04 Publishing infrastructure · May 2025-Jun 2026
A school day,
published
itself.
I built the infrastructure behind a school announcements platform used by 1,000+ students and 50+ staff. Teachers edited familiar Google files; scheduled Python jobs handled the path to production.
SOURCE 01GOOGLE DRIVEslides + document
SOURCE 02GOOGLE SHEETSevents + office news
CONTROLTORONTO CLOCKhourly / 08:58
PYTHONBUILD PIPELINEingest → transform → publish
EDGENGINX + CLOUDFLAREstatic delivery
THE OPERATING PROBLEM
Publishing could not depend on one technical person being awake.
Announcements, club calendars, concessions, office messages, and slideshow changes arrived through different sources and changed at different speeds. The system needed to preserve the tools staff already understood while making every update repeatable.
ONE FULL REFRESH
Follow an announcement to production.
The source document becomes plain text for analysis and PDF pages for the slideshow.
text/plain + application/pdfKnown cells become typed event, concession, and announcement records.
Main!A7:B14 / Main!G7A unified diff isolates changes; prompts turn source material into highlights.
difflib + GPT-4oGenerated text and JSON are injected into templates, then assets are copied cleanly.
replacement/ → prod/Nginx serves the generated site while Cloudflare protects and accelerates it.
static HTML / CSS / JS- Press run publish to trace the build
BUILD PROGRESS
02
TWO SPEEDSFresh where it matters.
Fresh where it matters.
Heavy work only when needed.
TORONTO08:58timezone-aware scheduler
EVERY HOUR
DAILY
CALENDAROFFICECONCESSIONSCLUBSCACHE
Small focused scripts keep operational information current without rebuilding the entire slideshow and summary pipeline.
BACKUPDRIVE EXPORTPDF RENDERAI DIFFBUILD
The expensive path runs once each morning, preserving yesterday's source before generating the day's complete production bundle.
03
BUILD ANATOMY
One source becomes several interfaces.
The pipeline does more than move files. It deliberately reshapes each source into the format the browser needs.
STAFF INPUTGoogle workspacedocuments, slides, cells
HTMLHighlights
JAVASCRIPTEvents + office
IMAGESDaily slides
STATICProduction bundle
04Reliability choices
Automation that leaves evidence
and preserves a way back.
Keep the previous source.
Before a new Drive export lands, the last text and PDF files are renamed as backups. The diff and a recovery copy come from the same decision.
slides-new → slides-oldFail ranges independently.
A missing calendar range logs a warning and the loop continues, so one malformed section does not erase every other event.
warn + continueGenerate browser-ready data.
Structured records are serialized with JSON rather than assembled by hand, keeping quotes and punctuation valid in production JavaScript.
json.dumps(...)Report every run.
Refresh milestones go to stdout and Discord, making success, failed dependencies, and deployment timing visible away from the server.
timestamp + webhookStaff kept editing familiar files. Students received a dependable product.
The infrastructure removed repetitive publishing work without forcing a new content system onto teachers. It supported 1,000+ students, 50+ staff, and more than 25,000 monthly visits at peak usage.
1,000+ students served50+ staff contributors25K+ monthly visits2 refresh cadences