The Last Message
Full-Stack Developer
About the Project
The Last Message is a digital publishing platform built around a specific book — a web and mobile reader with paid access. The interesting half is the content pipeline: the source material arrived as a PDF and had to be extracted, split into sections, structured, and imported into the database before any of it could be served as navigable, searchable content.
Key Highlights
- Wrote the Python ingestion pipeline that extracts PDF content, segments it into sections, and imports it into PostgreSQL
- Built the reading experience in Next.js with section navigation and progress tracking
- Integrated Paystack for purchase and access control
- Built the React Native mobile reader against the same API
- Modelled the content schema in TypeORM so chapters, sections, and messages stay independently addressable
Technical Challenges
PDF extraction is deceptively hard — the source had inconsistent section markers and formatting that broke naive parsing, so the pipeline needed several passes and manual verification steps rather than a single script. I kept the pipeline as standalone Python scripts rather than folding it into the API, because ingestion is a one-off operation that shouldn't add dependencies to a service that just serves content.