From Skyscape to Congo: How We Got Here

Congo didn't start as Congo. It started as The Skyscape — a constellation of projects built over years, each teaching us something about what software should be.

The Skyscape Era

The original projects tell the story:

• The Skyscape — the first platform. A community hub with authentication, profiles, and real-time features.
• Headquarters (HQ) — a command center for managing servers, apps, and team operations.
• SkyCode — an online code editor. The ancestor of dev.congo.gg.
• SkyDeck — a dashboard builder. Drag-and-drop panels, live data.
• SkyKit — a component library. The first attempt at a shared UI system.
• SkyLab — an experimentation platform. A/B testing, feature flags.
• SkyLinks — a link management service.
• SkyShot — a screenshot service. The direct ancestor of screenshots.congo.gg.
• TeamLink — team collaboration. Real-time messaging, file sharing.
• Soupbase — a database-as-a-service attempt. The spiritual ancestor of Catabase.
• DevTools — developer utilities. CLI tools and deployment helpers.
• Workbench — a project workspace. Another ancestor of the dev platform.

Every one of these projects was written in Go. Every one taught us something. And every one lived on its own server, its own domain, its own infrastructure.

The Problem

Eighteen projects across a dozen servers. $300/month in infrastructure. Each project had its own auth system, its own database setup, its own deployment pipeline. When one broke, debugging meant SSH-ing into a different server and remembering how that particular project was configured.

The software was good. The architecture was scattered.

The Crystallization

Congo is what happens when you take everything you learned from eighteen projects and ask: what if this was all one framework, one deployment target, one codebase pattern?

• The auth system from Skyscape became magic link auth in the Congo framework
• The dashboard from HQ became the Congo Dev workbench
• The screenshot service from SkyShot became screenshots.congo.gg
• The code editor from SkyCode became code-server integration
• The database patterns from Soupbase and DevTools became Congo's ORM

We didn't throw away the old projects. We archived them, studied them, and extracted the patterns that survived five generations of iteration.

The Consolidation

Right now, we're in the consolidation phase. The old Skyscape servers are still running — powered off or maintained — alongside the new Congo infrastructure. The archive lives at /repos/archive/, eighteen projects preserved as reference.

The goal: everything on congo-1. One server. One framework. Every service a Congo app.

This is generation 5 or 6, depending on how you count. It's not done. It's never done. But for the first time, the architecture matches the ambition.