YES Website

The public web experience for the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES). It combines a scrollable interactive-globe launch, a portrait-first directory of Yale builders, The YES Thesis, public writing and reporting, and a direct way into the community.

View the live site

Built with Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, SVG, and optional server-side integrations with Airtable.

Why this exists

An entrepreneurship community needs more than an events page. People need to see who is building, understand the organization's point of view, find relevant peers, and know how to participate. This site gives each of those jobs a focused surface while keeping the experience visually coherent.

Product highlights

• Evidence-led launch — the Wall Street Journal story about the Yale Hacker House opens the experience as a newspaper clipping beside a rotatable 3D light-field globe. New Haven and San Francisco are labeled and the reveal settles in under a second.
• Portrait-first builder directory — profiles with available images lead the wall, followed by deliberate monogram profiles. Semantic search runs entirely in the browser against vectors baked at build time, so intent-based queries like "helping blind people navigate" rank the right builders with no API key, no server round-trip, and no record of the query. Keyword ranking covers the case where the model cannot be fetched.
• Shareable dossiers — catalog entries open as intercepted modal routes during browsing and retain stable, server-rendered URLs for direct links.
• Git-backed publishing — essays, talks, workshops, lessons, and press entries are validated from Markdown at build time. External resources can appear in the same reverse-chronological index without being re-hosted.
• Consent-aware data paths — Airtable-backed public records are selected from consent-filtered views, re-checked in code, and reduced to explicit field allowlists.
• Portraits with provenance — the directory's portraits were collected from public pages rather than submitted, so each records the page it came from and can be removed by deleting one file. Builders without one render a monogram rather than a stand-in.
• Honest program states — Common Room replaces Aude and is visibly marked pending; the site does not imply that applications or cohort dates exist before they do.
• Graceful local mode — the public experience builds without third-party credentials. Optional forms, feeds, and processed portraits activate only when their configuration is present; search needs none of it.

Pages

Route	Purpose
/	3D globe launch, WSJ hook, people preview, and complete Press section
/thesis	The YES Thesis and invitation to build
/common-room	Pending program status and the open path into YES
/catalog	Portrait-first builder directory and dossier browser
/catalog/[slug]	Direct, shareable builder dossier
/reservoir/[slug]	Locally hosted Reservoir entry
/work	Proof-point page. No longer linked from anywhere — reachable only by URL
/enter	General community intake form
/builders	Consent-gated ledger that stays dark below its minimum entry count

/manifesto, /aude, and /aude/apply permanently redirect to the renamed public routes. /reservoir redirects to the homepage Press section. /work and /builders remain unlinked legacy routes; /builders is also gated by a minimum consented-entry count.

Architecture

flowchart LR
  CSV[Curated catalog CSV] --> Import[Catalog import script]
  Import --> JSON[Versioned builders.json]
  MD[Reservoir Markdown] --> Build[Next.js build]
  JSON --> Build
  Views[Consent-filtered Airtable views] -. optional build-time feed .-> Build
  Views -. approved headshots .-> Portraits[Portrait pipeline]
  Portraits --> Build
  Build --> Static[Static pages and catalog dossiers]

  Browser --> Static
  Browser --> Intake[Join API]
  Intake -. configured .-> State[Airtable People and Log tables]
  Browser --> Search[In-browser semantic search]

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The application is static-first, not a static export. Content pages and dossiers are generated at build time; the intake and search endpoints use the Node.js runtime so credentials never need to reach the browser.

Notable technical decisions

• Human-triggered publishing. Airtable feeds are read during a build, with no ISR or scheduled regeneration. A public-data change therefore requires a deployment.
• Two catalog sources with different trust models. The main catalog combines a version-controlled directory assembled from public sources with explicitly consented Airtable records. The consented record wins on a slug collision. The separate /builders ledger uses only the consent-gated Airtable view.
• Validation at system boundaries. Zod schemas validate form payloads on both the client and server. Reservoir frontmatter is validated during the build, and invalid entries fail rather than partially render.
• Search without a server. Builder vectors are baked at build time and the query is embedded client-side, both with all-MiniLM-L6-v2. This removes an API dependency, a per-search cost and a privacy surface at once, in exchange for a lazily-fetched model. lib/catalog/embed-text.ts is shared by the bake and the browser, because a drift between the two turns cosine scores into noise without failing anything.
• The wall comes first. Every builder is server-rendered beneath a short page introduction. Available portraits appear first, the grid filters immediately while typing, and the embedding model is fetched only when someone focuses the search.
• Search cuts, browsing does not. A search returns its strong matches only, capped at 24, using a floor relative to the best score. Ranking the whole directory made every search look identical below the fold and implied a relevance the tail did not have. A floor of three results keeps a narrow query from returning nothing.
• Build-time image treatment. Portraits from either source are cropped and converted to color and duotone WebP files before the site build, avoiding expiring attachment URLs and browser-side filters.
• Mechanical design constraints. Repository scripts enforce the approved type scale and scan consented dossier copy for disallowed promotional language.

Run locally

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20.9 or newer (the minimum declared by the locked Next.js version)

git clone https://github.com/ariyannp07/YES-Website.git
cd YES-Website
npm ci
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000. No environment variables are required for the public pages or checked-in catalog.

To enable integrations, copy the example file and add only the services you need:

cp .env.example .env.local

Never put an Airtable or xAI credential in a NEXT_PUBLIC_ variable.

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Purpose
NEXT_PUBLIC_PALETTE	No	Initial palette: night (default) or paper
NEXT_PUBLIC_SHOW_PALETTE_TOGGLE	No	Enables the review-only palette switcher
AIRTABLE_TOKEN	No	Server-side Airtable record access
AIRTABLE_BASE_ID	No	Airtable base used by feeds, forms, and audit logs
AIRTABLE_PEOPLE_TABLE	No	Overrides the default People table name
AIRTABLE_LOG_TABLE	No	Overrides the default Log table name
AIRTABLE_CATALOG_VIEW	No	Overrides the consented builder view name
AIRTABLE_ALUMNI_VIEW	No	Overrides the consented dossier view name
INTAKE_LOG_OWNER	No	Human owner recorded on intake audit rows
XAI_API_KEY	No	Enables server-side semantic catalog search

When Airtable is absent, the catalog uses its version-controlled directory, the two forms report that they are not connected, and /builders remains in its dark state. When xAI is absent, the catalog continues to provide local text filtering.

Commands

Command	What it does
npm run dev	Starts the local Next.js development server
npm run build	Creates the production build
npm run start	Serves a completed production build
npm run typecheck	Runs TypeScript without emitting files
npm run check:type-scale	Rejects type sizes outside the shared scale
npm run check:adjectives	Scans the live Airtable dossier feed when configured
npm run check	Runs typecheck and both repository policy checks
npm run build:portraits	Generates static WebP portrait pairs from both portrait sources
npm run embed	Re-bakes catalog search vectors after the directory changes
npm test	Runs Vitest (the repository does not yet include test files)

Regenerate the checked-in catalog after editing its source CSV with:

node scripts/import-catalog.mjs

Repository map

app/                    Pages, layouts, and request-time API routes
components/             Interactive and presentational components
content/catalog/        Version-controlled directory source and generated JSON
content/reservoir/      Git-backed editorial entries
content/manifesto.ts    Approved Thesis copy and rendering blocks (legacy filename)
lib/airtable/           Server-only Airtable reads, writes, and audit logging
lib/                    Content loaders, schemas, search corpus, and visual models
scripts/                Catalog import, portrait processing, and policy checks

Content and deployment

See Content, data, and release operations for the Airtable contract, catalog import workflow, portrait generation, Reservoir publishing, and the pre-deploy review checklist.

This repository is an active implementation. The preview is deployed, but copy approval, public-record review, integration configuration, and release checks remain editorial responsibilities rather than assumptions made by the code.