Project
The Olive Branch Review
A community writing platform — original work, peer feedback, and a publishing standard that takes both seriously.
What it is
The Olive Branch Review is a community writing platform. Members share original work — poetry, fiction, essays, experimental forms, fanfiction with appropriate tagging, nonfiction with proper citations — and engage with each other's work through peer feedback. In the platform's own framing: not just a website where you dump your writing and hope someone reads it. A community.
Live at olivebranchreview.com.
What it isn't
It's also explicit about what the platform won't host: hate speech, discrimination, spam. Tagging conventions and citation expectations exist so that the community side actually functions — submission without engagement isn't enough, and content goes up with the context other members need to respond to it well.
My role
I'm the founder and managing member of Royal Coast Media LLC, the company behind the publication. On the technical side, I built and maintain the full stack — the front-end, the back-end, authentication, content management, and moderation tooling. On the publication side, I work with contributors and on the editorial standards that the community operates by.
What I'm taking from it
Operating a small publication end to end — engineering, editorial, and community at once — is the kind of work that teaches you things you don't pick up building software in isolation. The lessons I'd most point to:
- How much of "platform quality" is editorial and community judgment, not features
- What submission and moderation flows actually need to feel like when real people are using them
- The cost of every UI decision when you have to read the resulting threads
A longer write-up of those lessons is coming.