Case study
Alphasocial
A social platform covering accounts, profiles, posts, feeds and the interactions between them, built early on, and the project that taught me a feed is a read problem.
Overview
A social platform: accounts, profiles, posts, feeds and the interactions between them.
One of my earliest substantial builds, and the one where I learned how much of a social product is the read path rather than the write path.
What I own
Backend and data model, with front-end work alongside.
Complexities tackled
A feed is a read problem. Posting is trivial. Assembling a personalised, ordered feed for each user without doing that work from scratch on every page load is where the design decisions live, and it is the part that determines whether the product survives having users.
Relationships are the schema. Follows, likes and comments are all edges between the same handful of entities, and getting those tables and their indexes right early is far cheaper than fixing them once there is data to migrate.
Stack
Python with Flask, MySQL, and a server-rendered front end.
Working on something similar?
Tell me what you are building and what is in the way. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.