A full-stack social networking platform for women in sports, built with a MERN architecture and expanded with realtime messaging, geospatial discovery, brand content workflows, moderation tooling, and admin analytics.
Executive Summary
Product Type
Community platform with social, content, messaging, and business surfaces
Technical Depth
Realtime sockets, geospatial search, polymorphic moderation, and analytics dashboards
Business Layer
Brand portals, articles, subscriptions, sponsorships, and engagement metrics
Career Context
Early foundational project that shaped my platform architecture thinking
Overview
The Problem
Women in sports needed a community platform that combined social discovery, local groups, content, messaging, and brand participation instead of siloed tools and generic social experiences.
The Opportunity
Build a full-featured community platform with social networking, realtime chat, geospatial discovery, content publishing, business/brand workflows, and moderation controls in one system.
My Role
One of the first major applications I worked on. I contributed as a full-stack engineer across frontend and backend implementation, realtime features, data modeling, and platform functionality delivery.
Why It Matters
This project is an early foundation piece in my portfolio because it shows broad systems thinking early: social graph logic, chat, geospatial queries, moderation, brand tooling, payments, and analytics.
Domain Model Snapshot
Community Graph
Users, friends, following, blocking/soft-blocking, recommendations, group membership, and role assignments form the social access and interaction model.
Content + Engagement
Posts, nested comments, likes, mentions, articles, saves, views, clicks, and flags power the community and brand content loops.
Business + Brands
Brands manage profiles, locations, followers, articles, subscriptions, copywriters/managers, and analytics through dedicated business workflows.
Governance + Moderation
Notifications, preferences, role/permission systems, content flagging, admin dashboards, and sponsor controls support platform operations and trust.
Architecture Decisions
SheIsAction combines community features, chat, content, business tooling, and moderation. The architecture challenge is not any one feature; it is how all of them coexist with acceptable performance, security, and user experience.
Core Runtime Flows
Why These Decisions
MERN + Socket.IO for a feature-rich social platform
Why: The product required fast iteration across social features, content, realtime chat, and admin tooling in one codebase.
Impact: Enabled rapid delivery of broad platform capabilities while keeping a familiar JavaScript stack across frontend and backend.
MongoDB for flexible social/content schemas
Why: Posts, nested comments, notification payloads, brand/location structures, and evolving social features benefit from schema flexibility with targeted indexing.
Impact: Fast feature evolution with Mongoose modeling, while indexes and aggregations handled key performance paths.
Geospatial-first data modeling with GeoJSON and 2dsphere indexes
Why: User, group, and brand discovery is location-aware and needed proper distance calculations and map integrations.
Impact: Efficient geospatial search/filtering and stronger location-based product experiences.
Dedicated flagging model with polymorphic references
Why: Moderation needed to cover multiple content types without duplicating flag workflows per model.
Impact: A reusable moderation pipeline across posts, comments, users, brands, and articles.
Multi-role system with UserRole junctions
Why: Users could simultaneously participate as normal users and platform/business operators (brand manager, copywriter, admin).
Impact: Flexible RBAC without overloading the user model with a single role assumption.
Hybrid notifications (realtime + preference-aware digests)
Why: Community platforms need both immediate feedback loops and user-controlled notification volume.
Impact: Socket-driven immediacy plus scheduled digest email patterns and granular preferences.
Cloudflare Images + direct upload URL patterns
Why: Image-heavy social/content workflows need CDN-backed delivery and scalable upload handling.
Impact: Better media performance and cleaner image lifecycle management across profiles, posts, brands, and articles.
Observability + performance posture early
Why: The platform had broad feature surface and query complexity (social graph, analytics, geospatial, search).
Impact: NewRelic APM, logging, indexing, and pagination helped maintain visibility into performance and runtime behavior.
Backend / API
The backend supports a broad feature surface: social interactions, community groups, brand/business workflows, moderation systems, search, geospatial discovery, and analytics endpoints.
JWT authentication, bcrypt password hashing, verification emails, reset tokens with expiry, activation resend, and role-aware access control underpin the account system.
User profiles include GeoJSON location, sports interests/experience levels, questionnaire responses, social relationships, search criteria, and notification preferences.
Posts support text/images/location/tagging, nested comments, likes, soft-delete, edit tracking, flagging, and feed-level pagination/infinite scroll consumption.
Public/private groups include geospatial location metadata, membership controls, invite/request workflows, sport and experience filtering, and group feeds.
Multi-entity search spans users, groups, brands, and articles with filtering, pagination, geospatial constraints, and blocking relationship enforcement.
Brand profiles, article publishing, follower analytics, subscriptions, and Stripe-backed business flows create a business/creator surface inside the community platform.
Polymorphic flagging, review workflows, resolution tracking, role models, and user-role assignments support trust and platform governance.
Email services handle verification, resets, invites, and digests, while scheduled tasks support digest delivery and periodic maintenance workflows.
Frontend (React)
The React frontend spans consumer social experiences, brand portal functionality, and admin oversight tooling, which makes state management and UI system consistency especially important.
React 18 with Redux Toolkit and redux-persist powers a feature-dense application shell with route-based experiences for users, groups, chat, brands, and admin dashboards.
The frontend supports social posting, nested comments, likes, mentions, infinite scroll, and responsive interaction patterns for community engagement.
User profiles, group pages, location-aware discovery, and filtering UIs connect the social graph and geospatial search features into usable flows.
Brand users access portal experiences for article creation/publishing, business profile management, and analytics/engagement tracking.
Admin UI surfaces platform analytics, content moderation queues, user/brand/group oversight, and system management entities like roles, tags, and sponsors.
MUI v5, Formik/Yup, Quill, dropzones, carousels, data grids, date pickers, and theme toggles support a rich consumer + admin hybrid UX.
Optimized selectors, lazy loading, optimistic updates, debounced search, and test tooling (Jest/RTL/Enzyme) support maintainability and responsiveness.
Realtime Messaging & Notifications
Realtime chat and notification behavior are central to the platform experience, but the more interesting architecture detail is how realtime delivery coexists with unread tracking, categories, and digest/pref systems.
One-on-one and group chats support realtime delivery, latest message tracking, unread counts, and group chat admin controls.
Socket events handle online/offline state, active users, typing indicators, message notifications, connection status, and reconnection behavior.
Notifications span social, community, brand, article, and messaging events with read states, categories, and user preference controls.
Business & Admin Platform
SheIsAction goes beyond a social feed. It includes business-facing and platform-ops capabilities that materially change the architecture and data model complexity.
Brand & Business Layer
Brand profiles include multi-location geospatial data, opening hours, social links, brand managers/copywriters, follower analytics, ratings, and subscription state.
Article CMS + Content Strategy
Rich article authoring with categories, sport tags, custom tags, draft/publish/archive states, and deep engagement metrics supports a content-led business channel.
Sponsorship System
Scheduled sponsor campaigns support targeting by location/interests/age range plus impression and click tracking for monetization workflows.
Admin Analytics + Moderation
Admin dashboards cover growth, geography, sport popularity, content performance, and flagged content review workflows with resolution tracking.
Ops, Security & Performance
The platform combines consumer UX, business tools, and heavy data operations. Security, indexing, observability, and runtime instrumentation are essential, not optional.
Security Stack
Helmet, CORS, JWT verification, input validation (Joi), password hashing, token expiry, and XSS protection patterns (DOMPurify on frontend rendering) support platform safety.
Observability
Morgan request logging and NewRelic APM provide runtime visibility across a broad feature surface with many query and integration paths.
Performance Strategy
MongoDB indexes (text/geospatial/compound), aggregation pipelines, pagination, CDN image delivery, lazy loading, and optimized queries support scale and responsiveness.
Infrastructure Integrations
Cloudflare Images, Google Maps, Stripe, email services, and Socket.IO create a production-relevant integration landscape with real operational complexity.
Tradeoffs & Constraints
This project shows what happens when a platform grows across social, business, and admin domains. The tradeoffs are real, but they are also exactly what made it such a strong technical foundation.
Broad feature scope vs simplicity
Rationale: The platform combines social networking, realtime chat, geospatial discovery, content publishing, brands, sponsors, and admin analytics.
Tradeoff: High product ambition and strong architecture learning value, but a large surface area to maintain and test comprehensively.
Flexible schemas vs stricter normalized models
Rationale: MongoDB/Mongoose enabled rapid evolution of social/content features and nested structures.
Tradeoff: Fast iteration and feature breadth, with additional responsibility on indexing, aggregation design, and schema discipline.
Realtime + digest notifications vs simpler notification model
Rationale: Community engagement needs immediate signals and user-controlled volume management.
Tradeoff: Richer user experience but more backend complexity across preferences, scheduling, and event routing.
Many external integrations vs lower operational surface
Rationale: Maps, payments, email, image hosting, and APM each add meaningful value to the platform.
Tradeoff: Greater capability and realism, with higher configuration and operational management overhead.
Early-career codebase maturity vs architectural ambition
Rationale: As one of my first large applications, the system grew quickly across many domains.
Tradeoff: A strong demonstration of breadth and problem-solving, with obvious later opportunities for deeper modularization and contract hardening.
Outcomes / Metrics
I do not list public metrics here, but SheIsAction remains a strong portfolio asset because of the breadth and technical depth of what was implemented and integrated in one platform.
Outcomes / Delivery Signals
Quality / Performance Signals
What I'd Improve Next
If I were evolving this platform today, the focus would be on modularizing feature domains, strengthening contracts, and improving test/observability coverage around the most complex realtime and moderation workflows.
Refactor broader domains into clearer service boundaries/modules as feature ownership grows.
Standardize API contracts and typed DTOs across frontend/backend for stronger long-term maintainability.
Increase automated test coverage around realtime, notification preference edge cases, and moderation workflows.
Evolve search and recommendation quality beyond regex/text + rule-based filtering where product demand justifies it.
Introduce more explicit event-driven patterns for notifications and analytics as platform scale grows.
Continue performance profiling and query optimization across heavy aggregation and feed/discovery paths.
Contact
I can help shape the architecture so social features, moderation, monetization, and admin tooling scale together instead of becoming separate systems too early.