Circus Archives: Production Video Platform with CI/CD Pipeline
Joey Musselman · December 1, 2025
The FSU Flying High Circus has decades of performance history scattered across personal collections with no central place to preserve or discover it. Alumni wanted a way to share, organize, and celebrate these performances before the footage was lost.
Challenge
Video is expensive to host and hard to upload reliably. The platform needed to handle files up to 2GB from browsers without timing out, automatically publish to YouTube for free hosting, support community-driven organization (voting, tagging, categorization), and be simple enough for non-technical alumni to use.
My Role & Contribution
Sole Developer — Full-Stack Development & DevOps
- Built chunked video upload system handling files up to 2GB directly from the browser using Vercel Blob
- Created an automated YouTube publishing pipeline using GitHub Actions CI/CD
- Designed a weighted community voting system for surfacing the best content
- Implemented performer tagging, multi-act categorization, and threaded comments
- Set up authentication with NextAuth.js and deployed on Vercel + Railway
Key Technologies
Impact
Live in production at flyinghighcircusarchives.com with active users contributing content. Alumni from multiple decades have uploaded and organized performances that were previously inaccessible. The automated YouTube pipeline eliminated manual upload work entirely.
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