Redbook

Redbook is the one project in this portfolio where I designed the whole architecture myself, rather than following a tutorial or template. It borrows feature ideas from Reddit and Facebook — voting, commenting, direct messaging — without being a clone of either. The goal wasn't just to build 'a social platform' — it was to prove I could handle something as critical as social media's core mechanics: a voting system, realtime messaging and notifications over Socket.io, image uploads through Cloudinary, and a fully Dockerized setup, all on a self-designed PERN stack, without leaning on a framework to handle the parts that are actually hard.

• Toggleable voting — Posts and comments each carry independent upvote/downvote arrays rather than a separate votes table. Casting a vote toggles it off if it's already active, and switches cleanly from up to down (or back) in a single request.
• Realtime chat and notifications — Direct messages and live notifications — new comments, upvotes, downvotes — are pushed over Socket.io to a per-user socket connection, so the UI updates instantly for the recipient without polling.
• Cloudinary-backed uploads — Profile, cover, and post images upload straight to Cloudinary through a parsed multipart form, keeping the Express server itself stateless.
• Docker Compose from day one — Postgres, the Prisma migration step, the Express API, and the React client all run through a single docker-compose.yaml — the same setup used locally and, with adjustments, in production.

Voting needed to feel instant without spamming notifications: switching a vote should notify the post's author, but withdrawing one shouldn't. I built the vote handlers as an explicit three-way branch — add, remove, switch — that mutates the right array and only fires a Socket.io notification on the branches where a vote is genuinely being cast, not removed.

It's stable and deployed now, so the near-term focus is comment threading — letting replies nest under other replies to any depth, which the schema is still flat for. Beyond that, it's ongoing polish as free time allows.