Banyan Labs Website
The public face of Banyan Labs — a Next.js + Payload CMS marketing platform with MDX blog, product showcases, and a self-service Lab experience for the team's portfolio products.
One site, three jobs.
Banyan Labs needed a digital storefront that does three jobs at once: tell its mission story (employing and mentoring justice-impacted developers through real client work), generate qualified partnership and contact leads, and showcase the portfolio of products built by the team — Harper, HALO, JONA, ProcurePath, ShareXR, Compass, Armada, Upcurve.
Headless CMS, MDX recruiting pages, hybrid router.
The site runs Next.js 16 with a hybrid App Router + Pages Router setup — Payload CMS routes (admin and API) live under the App Router; marketing pages live under classic Pages Router. Payload manages posts, media, and users out of Postgres on Cloud SQL with an encrypted Cloud SQL Connector tunnel that activates only in GCP environments via env-flag detection.
Lead capture funnels into SendGrid for transactional email and into Mailchimp for newsletter list management. The custom Cloud SQL Connector logic in payload.config.ts is the kind of infra detail that keeps local Postgres dev simple while running properly tunneled connections in prod.
Contributing engineer on a 10+ team.
Honest framing: this is a Banyan Labs team production with Shandea Hardin as project lead and Daniel Drew + Phillip Marress on PM. Top committers are Noah Biggs, Kevin Gravell, Jessica Sharp, and Matthew Wallace. My footprint is 27 commits under primary email plus 8 under secondary — meaningful but partial.
- Feature work across the App Router + Pages Router hybrid codebase, shipping through GitHub Actions CI/CD into Firebase App Hosting.
- Worked alongside a team of mostly OJT graduates — justice-impacted developers in real production work — on features ranging from blog social-share to deployment configuration.
What it's built on.
Live at banyanlabs.io.
The mission storefront, lead funnel, MDX-powered blog, and product showcase for a software studio that employs and mentors justice-impacted developers. I worked alongside the team on features end-to-end through PR cycles and GitHub Actions CI.