Own product · Maps · PostGIS

GoSUP — a community map of stand-up paddle launch spots

gosup.ro ↗

1 month ago·

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·3 min read

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Context

GoSUP is my own product, not a client project. I paddle, and finding a good place to put the board in the water usually means scrolling through old forum posts or asking around. So I built a map of stand-up paddle launch spots, contributed by paddlers themselves. It covers Romania and a growing list of countries around it — the Balkans, Spain and Greece — 12 country codes so far.

The problem

Launch spots are local knowledge: where you can park, whether the bank is muddy, if the river is calm enough for beginners. That knowledge needs a place where anyone can add it, where it's easy to find by region or by name, and where someone checks it before it goes public.

What I built

• Spot pages at clean URLs — country, region, spot — with a map, gallery, YouTube video, coordinates, "navigate with" buttons for Waze and other apps, nearby spots and reviews with a rating breakdown. Each spot is a lake, river, sea or delta.
• Search and discovery: search that ignores diacritics, a world map on the home page, stats, curated collections and spots near the visitor's location.
• Contributions: signed-in users add spots and write reviews, and have their own area with their spots and a profile with an avatar.
• Moderation: admins get an approve/reject queue and manage spots, users, reviews, countries and regions. Users can be banned temporarily or permanently, their sessions can be managed, and an admin can sign in as a user to see exactly what they see, with a banner to switch back.

Under the hood

The data lives in Postgres with PostGIS (geography(Point, 4326)), accessed through Prisma 7 with the pg adapter in a dedicated schema. Search runs through a SQL function that combines PostGIS with unaccent, which is what makes diacritics irrelevant when you type. Supabase is only used for avatar storage.

Authentication moved from Supabase Auth to Better Auth with magic links, keeping every existing user id. Translations are written inline in English and extracted to .po files with next-intl, and Romanian is the default language, with English under /en.

In October 2026 I spent a round on performance: ISR for country and region pages, a static app shell and server-rendered map tiles. For SEO there's a sitemap with hreflang, canonical URLs, noindex on account and admin pages, and an llms.txt route regenerated daily with live stats.

Status

Built in bursts since September 2025 — around 300 commits — and still growing. The next steps are more spots and more countries.

Stack

Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Prisma 7, PostgreSQL + PostGIS, Better Auth, next-intl, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Leaflet + react-leaflet (OpenStreetMap), motion, zod, Brevo, Supabase Storage, Vercel.