Hey there, I'm Felipe 🥀

The project

ADWEEK’s homepage changes throughout the day. Editors move stories, swap headlines, and reshape the page as the news develops. Behind it all, the latest reporting, video, advertising, and partner content have to work together without slowing readers down.

The challenge was building a homepage flexible enough for the newsroom while keeping the experience fast and consistent.

My part

I rebuilt the homepage in React around reusable modules that editors can arrange as coverage changes. Stories, video, events, navigation, and advertising all needed to work within the same experience. The new homepage launched in June 2025.

After launch, I focused on The Latest, the feed that updates as the newsroom publishes. I reworked how it fetched stories, improved caching, and optimized the database queries behind it. Those changes reduced 95th-percentile server response times by more than two-thirds.

In the first full summer after launch, homepage views grew by roughly two-thirds year over year, while reader engagement increased substantially.

The result was a faster, more adaptable front page built to keep pace with the newsroom.

The project

For an advertising publication, the Super Bowl is one of the biggest nights of the year. The commercials are the story, and readers want the reactions as they happen.

Throughout the game, editors publish timestamped updates to a single article. The live blog sits alongside the ad tracker, rankings, and video gallery, giving readers a running account of the newsroom’s coverage.

My part

I helped build the live blog and its homepage widget for Super Bowl LX, focusing on two moments: helping readers discover the coverage and helping those already following along recognize new updates.

The homepage widget gave readers a way into the live blog. Inside the article, I added a subtle wave through the cards and a pulse along the timeline whenever a new update arrived. Once the motion finished, timestamps stayed visible so readers could follow the sequence without losing their place.

Across 26 newsroom updates, the live blog nearly doubled its views and more than doubled its readership compared with the previous year’s coverage. Readers also spent considerably more time with it than the site average.

The goal was to make live coverage feel immediate without making it distracting.

The project

On the homepage, readers want to know what happened today. Inside an article, they may want to know how a reporter reached a particular conclusion.

I built two ways into the reporting: a homepage briefing that links to several stories, and AI Key Takeaways that connect readers to passages within an individual article.

The briefing refreshes automatically, while each article’s takeaways go through editorial review before publication.

My part

For the homepage briefing, I built controls that let editors choose how many stories to include and which categories to exclude. The system supports multiple AI models and automatically tries another if the first fails. If generation fails entirely, readers continue seeing the last successful briefing with its story links intact.

For Key Takeaways, I wanted readers to be able to check what AI was telling them. Each takeaway links to the passage it summarizes. Click one, and the page scrolls straight to that paragraph and briefly highlights it, making it easy to compare the summary against the reporter’s own words.

I also built editorial review into the publishing process. Editors can rewrite, regenerate, or remove takeaways, and must confirm their accuracy before publishing an article with them enabled. Their approval is recorded as part of the workflow.

Both features were built around the same idea: AI should help readers get into the reporting, not replace it.

The project

Every Super Bowl ad gets judged the morning after. EDO’s TV Outcomes rankings add data to that conversation, measuring which commercials drove consumer engagement.

The rankings page brings that data together with video and interactive elements, making performance especially important during one of ADWEEK’s busiest editorial events.

The existing experience had rendering and performance issues that needed to be addressed before the next Super Bowl.

My part

I traced unnecessary video requests to a React rendering issue that caused repeated work as readers scrolled. Fixing that behavior addressed the problem in the browser.

I also improved caching to reduce redundant data fetching and server-side rendering. Rather than repeatedly preparing the same information for each visitor, the page could reuse work that had already been done.

With those improvements in place, I redesigned the rankings experience for Super Bowl 2026 and connected it to the broader coverage through the Super Bowl hub.

Readers spent nearly twice as long on the rankings page as the site average.

The project

ADWEEK’s Fastest Growing Agencies rankings bring together agencies from across the industry, organized into national, regional, and specialty lists.

The archive lived in a legacy directory plugin that had become tightly coupled to the broader site. Preparing a new edition also meant managing years of agency profiles, artwork, and rankings.

I wanted to give editors a simpler way to publish each year’s list while preserving the work behind previous editions.

My part

I started by building a migration tool to move historical agency profiles and rankings into a new system, preserving the published order of each list.

From there, I built a dedicated WordPress plugin for the 2026 edition. Editors can import agencies from a spreadsheet, reuse existing profiles and artwork, and update an agency’s information without changing previous years.

Because agencies can hold different positions across multiple lists, I built independent ranking controls. Editors can drag agencies into place without affecting other lists, while readers can filter results and expand profiles without losing their place.

The new workflow made publishing roughly 40% faster, reducing repetitive editorial work and allowing us to retire the legacy directory plugin.

What used to require working around an older system became a publishing experience built specifically for the newsroom.