Building a social media site - Introduction

In my previous post I mentioned that I’m working on a personal project. I’ve had several smaller pet projects/experiments in the past, as I really believe that the easiest way of learning a new technology / design pattern / methodology is to actually dig elbow deep into it, and just build something that works, and maintainable. Although .NET has always been in my main focus, I’ve built websites in PHP, mobile games in Java/Swift, 3D raymarching demo in GLSL, etc. as I’m constantly aiming to widen my horizon in different technology areas. And let’s be frank, we all enjoy creating things. As engineers, it’s in our nature.

This current case isn’t different. A few months ago I had an idea, and after playing with the thought of building my own social platform, I’ve decided to do market research, sketchup UI mockups and start building it. I realise that creating a viable product - and by that I mean it’s successful on the market - is actually pretty damn hard. I’ve tried it several times, and failed. Failure is relative though. If you can learn from your mistakes, and learn new things along the way, I consider it a win.

I started with this mindset, and I think that once it’s finished, I’ll know a whole lot more about writing and putting a scalable social platform into production. Will it ever see the light? I certainly hope so :)

But

So far I haven’t really shared my struggles and learning experience with anyone. This time though, I’d like to grab the opportunity, and document the planning and development process of this piece of work. This post is the first part of a series of articles about the new platform, with all the technical quirks and know-hows you’ll probably need to kickstart your own scalable webapp in the cloud.

Technologies (TBC)

• Frontend
  • Angular4
  • SASS
• Backend (REST Api)
  • dotnetcore 2.0
  • MongoDb / SQL
• Authentication
  • Oauth 2.0
  • Custom JWT provider
• CI
  • CircleCI 2.0
• Hosting / CD
  • Docker containers
  • Kubernetes
  • GCloud
• DevOps
  • ELK stack
  • Prometheus

See you soon!