Culture-Relax

The context

Culture-Relax is a French non-profit that makes mainstream cinema and live performance accessible to people whose disability causes atypical behavior — autism, polyhandicap, intellectual or psychiatric disability, Alzheimer's. They publish a public directory of Relax sessions across the country, and run a back-office where partner venues (cinemas, theaters, opera houses, philharmonics) enter their sessions, manage their audience analytics, and reach their community.

I was brought in to modernize the legacy stack and ship their full feature roadmap before year-end. 400,000+ monthly visits run through what I shipped.

My role

Sole developer. Took the platform from a tired legacy stack to a modern one and shipped the entire backlog they had been sitting on.

What I built

• Strapi CMS migration, zero downtime

  Upgraded the back-office CMS several major versions without taking the public site offline. Editorial work continued throughout the migration.

• Audience analytics for partner venues

  Inside the back-office, partner cinemas and theaters can now see who's attending their Relax sessions and how their audience evolves over time. The data they needed to make the case for funding.

• Poster creator tool

  A simple in-app generator that lets venues turn a session into a printable poster matching the Culture-Relax brand. Small tool, real impact on how many of these posters actually end up on cinema walls.

• Better search across the public directory

  Families looking for a Relax session in their region need a few clicks and zero confusion. I reworked the search and filtering on the public site to match that bar.

• SendGrid newsletter automation

  Partner-facing newsletter pipeline to keep venues and audiences informed of new sessions, region by region.

• Accessibility work on the public site

  Given Culture-Relax's mission, WCAG compliance on the public site wasn't a nice-to-have. Color contrast, semantic structure, keyboard navigation, screen-reader output — done properly across the pages I touched.

Tech stack

• Strapi

  Headless CMS for the back-office — migrated across major versions.

• Node.js

  Backend services.

• React

  Public site and back-office UIs.

• TypeScript

  End-to-end.

• PostgreSQL

  Primary data store.

• SendGrid

  Newsletter and transactional email.

The trade-off

Non-profit budget, fixed timeline, a full backlog to ship. The brief wasn't "cut scope" — it was "ship everything they need, cleanly, without breaking what already works." The site shipped on time, the migration shipped with zero downtime, and the public site came out with WCAG compliance baked in.

Links

• culture-relax.org