Agadari: designing a news system for a region that deserves better

Readers in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region juggle dozens of channels, in several languages, with little way to express what actually matters to them. Keyword feeds are noisy; official notices get buried beside rumours.

The design question was not how should a feed look, but how can every reader say precisely what they care about — and trust what arrives?

Twelve main categories, twelve sub-categories under each, twelve niche topics under each of those. The growth is the point: a reader can be as broad as “Economy” or as exact as a single niche — 1,728 addressable topics, one query each.

Every schema decision — primary keys, locales, entitlement semantics, the event bus — was written up in a versioned architecture report before production code existed. Twenty-one reports later, the reasoning behind the product is as inspectable as the product.