East Village Hub

What I built

East Village Hub is a resident hub for East Village in Stratford. I founded it in September 2025, and I build it and run it on my own, with a growing team of AI agents.

It puts the things residents keep asking about in one place:

• Today: a daily view of what’s happening, including road closures and local notices.
• What’s on: events in and around East Village, plus a weekly “This week in E20” round-up.
• Latest news: short local stories on events, development and community life.
• Live: issues reported by residents, like a building with no heating, where neighbours can say “me too” and follow updates.
• Local help: who to call for heating, bins and repairs, plus finding trades, food and recommendations.
• Ask Rosie: an assistant for asking anything about E20. She’s named after my corgi.

The platform runs on Astro 5 for the frontend and Netlify for hosting and deployment. The editorial decisions are mine, and it’s built to be useful to a specific community.

How it’s run now

Sanity is gone. I’ve built an agentic system on Hermes, working with ChatGPT, to manage the site, and I’m part way through handing the day-to-day to a team of agents.

They find and list events and local info. They write and publish the news and the weekly digest. They handle live issues and Ask Rosie. They make code changes, fixes and deploys.

Everything public goes through me. The agents work in text and code only: there are no generated images anywhere on the Hub.

What problem it solved

Information about East Village was everywhere and nowhere. It lived in lots of WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups and scattered places, and the same questions kept coming up again and again. There was no central place for all of it.

East Village Hub exists to be that place: one reliable, local, genuinely useful home for what people in East Village need to know.

What I learned

Running both the editorial and technical sides of a publication at the same time forces clarity about priorities. The technology has to serve the journalism, not the other way around.

The harder lessons were editorial: what to cover, what to leave, how to stay consistent without burning out. That’s ongoing.

Tech used

Astro handles the static site generation and gives the frontend excellent performance without much effort. Netlify handles CI/CD and deployment, and connecting the GitHub repo directly means publishing is frictionless. A Hermes-based agent system working with ChatGPT runs the workflows, with me as the human in the loop.