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TECHNICAL PORTFOLIO

Platform Architecture & Systems Design

Selina Parker, M.A.|Dallas, TX|linkedin.com/in/selinaparker

Three production platforms architected and built, plus association management system migrations led for state professional association clients. Each entry describes the problem, the architectural decisions and their reasoning, the access and data model, and the scale the system is designed to carry.

Security posture is calibrated to exposure rather than applied uniformly. Public, multi-tenant systems handling personally identifiable information enforce database-level access control; internal single-tenant tools restricted at the infrastructure layer enforce authorization through workflow state. Each entry states which model applies and why.

MENTAL HEALTH EVENTS NETWORK

Sole architect and developer·Built end-to-end·mentalhealtheventsnetwork.com

Problem

Behavioral health professionals had no centralized way to discover continuing-education events, coordinate speaking opportunities, or verify compliance across 51 U.S. licensure jurisdictions. Event data was fragmented across provider sites, email lists, and informal networks with no single source of truth. No unified coordination layer existed that could ingest from multiple sources, deduplicate across jurisdictions, and surface verified opportunities with compliance context.

Architecture Decisions

Dual-client authorization model — user-context access and administrative access run through separate database clients — the first constrained by row-level security policies, the second able to bypass them for operational reads. Conflating the two is the common failure: it means privacy rules get relaxed to accommodate operational queries, and the security invariant erodes over time. Separating them keeps member-facing access provably constrained regardless of what administrative functions require.

Schema-first migrations with ledger verification — every schema change is versioned, applied in sequence, and records itself in a migrations ledger validated by an automated check. Database state cannot silently drift from what the application code expects. This is governance applied to engineering — the same principle as documented process standards, enforced by tooling rather than discipline.

Centralized extraction engine — one AI-powered parsing module serves all four intake channels rather than duplicating logic per channel, with documented invariants and per-operation cost tracking. Event schema is complex; duplicated extraction creates consistency debt and makes model or prompt changes untenable. Centralizing it keeps output quality and AI spend both predictable and measurable.

Access & Data Model

  • Authentication and row-level security policies enforced at the database layer; user actions filtered by policy, administrative operations explicitly scoped
  • Security-definer functions for authorization checks requiring authenticated user context
  • Speaker records classified as PII and restricted to platform-administrator policies
  • Jurisdiction mapping across 51 U.S. licensure regions with compliance state tracking
  • Atomic ownership transfers; scoped storage buckets; AI spend ledger tracking model usage and cost by operation

Scale & Structure

  • 51 U.S. licensure jurisdictions · 27 clinical specialties · verified organizations
  • Four live intake channels: automated ingestion, organization self-serve import, web submission, speaker interest
  • Event corpus past 1,000 records, with pagination architecture built for growth beyond API row limits

Stack

Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Supabase (Auth, row-level security, migrations) · Vercel · Claude API with structured output

ASSOCIATION ARCHITECTURE DIAGNOSTIC

Sole architect and developer·associationarchitecture.com/diagnostic

Problem

No standardized institutional maturity assessment existed for membership organizations. Associations seeking to understand their structural readiness had no instrument that measured governance, institutional continuity, operations, and member experience as an integrated system, and none that assessed workforce readiness as a distinct dimension.

Architecture Decisions

Workforce readiness as an independent axis — workforce capability is scored separately rather than folded into the four-pillar composite. Blending it would dilute both signals: an organization can have sound institutional architecture and an unprepared workforce, or the reverse, and those require different interventions. Keeping the axes independent enables quadrant-based diagnosis rather than a single undifferentiated maturity number.

Frontend–API separation — the assessment interface is a client application; interpretation, report generation, and contact orchestration run in a separate API service. This isolates AI credentials and spend server-side, keeps the assessment resilient if the interpretation layer is unavailable, and allows the scoring instrument and the interpretation logic to be revised independently.

Parallel interpretation calls with decoupled delivery — report sections generate concurrently rather than sequentially to control latency, and downstream delivery is fire-and-forget rather than blocking, so a failure in notification cannot fail the report. Systems are joined on a stable identifier rather than shared internal state, allowing each to evolve without coordinated deployment.

Access & Data Model

  • Public access with no authentication required; identity established by email at submission
  • Cross-origin controls restricting API access to the assessment client; webhook endpoints protected by shared secret
  • AI credentials isolated server-side; no keys exposed to the client
  • Non-destructive synchronization to downstream systems; no tracking beyond assessment submission

Scale & Structure

  • 35 assessment questions across five scoring dimensions; two-axis output model
  • 21-page generated report with AI-composed interpretation per dimension
  • Per-assessment AI cost metered and tracked; response latency held to a few seconds at the 95th percentile

Stack

React · Node API service · Vercel · Claude API · integration layer to CRM and delivery systems

ASSOCIATION CONTINUITY SYSTEM — PRODUCTION PLATFORM

Architect·Built solo; portal implementation executed with platform administrator support

Problem

The Association Continuity System is a 20-month governance, leadership, and operations curriculum for association executives, delivered across three resource tiers. Production ran on disconnected spreadsheets and shared drives with no single source of truth, no audit trail, no way to track handoffs between contributors, and no mechanism to detect broken cross-references across a curriculum where resources cite one another.

Architecture Decisions

Production pipeline as an enforced state machine — content moves through eight ordered, immutable stages from draft to live, each with a defined owner and enforced transitions. A resource cannot reach publication without passing every prior gate, and stages cannot be skipped or reversed through the interface. This is the governing principle of the discipline applied to its own production: the process is enforced by the system rather than by the discipline of the people running it.

Multi-dimensional syndication model — a single resource belongs simultaneously to a release month, a tier, a thematic category, one or more bundles, and optionally a white-label variant — represented through normalized join relationships rather than duplication. Bundles carry access type and unlock timing, enabling drip release without duplicating content. One resource, many memberships, no divergent copies.

Embedded database with write-ahead logging — an embedded file-backed database with foreign key enforcement and write-ahead logging, rather than a provisioned database server. For a single-tenant internal tool with a small contributor set, this eliminates infrastructure overhead entirely while preserving referential integrity and allowing concurrent reads during writes. The migration path to a client-server database is documented for the point at which concurrency justifies it.

Access & Data Model

  • Internal single-tenant tool; network access restricted at the infrastructure layer rather than by application authentication
  • Authorization enforced through workflow state rather than identity — stage ownership determines what each contributor can advance
  • No personally identifiable information stored; content is proprietary curriculum material
  • Parameterized queries throughout; input validation and referential constraints at the schema layer
  • Versioned resource history with scheduled six-month review cycles and overdue tracking

Scale & Structure

  • 20-month curriculum · three resource tiers · thematic category sets with white-label variants
  • Eight-stage production pipeline with per-stage queue visibility and handoff tracking
  • Cross-reference resolution across the full curriculum, surfacing broken or unresolved links

Stack

Next.js (App Router) · React · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · shadcn/ui · embedded SQL database with write-ahead logging · Vercel

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM MIGRATIONS

Migration lead·Three state professional associations

Problem

State professional associations were running either legacy association management platforms or a fragmented suite of point tools — separate systems for membership records, event registration, continuing-education delivery, email, and payments, with no shared data layer between them. Member records lived in multiple places, continuing-education certificates were issued manually, and staff carried the integration burden between systems that were never designed to work together.

Approach

Consolidation onto a single configured platform serving association management, learning management, and member portal functions together. Migration sequence designed around member data integrity first, then continuing-education delivery, then events and communications — so the highest-risk data moved under controlled conditions before dependent systems were cut over. Configuration patterns established on the first engagement were adapted rather than rebuilt for subsequent clients.

Attribution

Led all three migrations end to end. Delivery team executes implementation under her direction.

Scope Delivered

  • Migration off established commercial association management platforms and fragmented tool suites onto unified governed infrastructure
  • Association management, learning management, and member portal functions consolidated onto a single platform
  • Continuing-education delivery and certificate issuance automated into governed workflow
  • Membership operations, event management, and member communications brought under one system
  • Three engagements of varying scale: one small association, one large, one currently in progress

Outcomes

  • Annual conference attendance increased 33%; membership sign-ups increased 15%
  • Programming scaled from 2 annual events to 12 without proportional staff growth

ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Web properties designed and developed for association clients and portfolio ventures, delivered with a design and development team. Member-authenticated portal and continuing-education delivery components are covered under the migrations above.

WORKING METHOD

  • Architecture documented per platform: problem, decisions with stated tradeoffs, access model, and scale characteristics
  • Schema-first development with versioned, verified migrations
  • AI spend instrumented and tracked per operation rather than left unbounded
  • Security posture calibrated to exposure and stated explicitly, not applied uniformly
  • Has led and coached development teams delivering comparable builds