Engineering Case Study: Image Marketplace & Job Market

What it is, how it grew, and which calls were mine.

What the app does

Feed Infinite-scroll discovery for new users who have no follows yet.

Pin-license marketplace Buyer/seller flows: eligibility, listings, protected originals.

Job board Artists ↔ employers via JDs, credentials, multi-party verification.

Student social app
Follow, chat, posts — a normal starting point.
Growing up on the project
From “it runs locally” to knowing how it fails: load saturated the DB and broke auth (token revocation, slow work off the request path); mail/media blocking handlers → background jobs; hot reads hammering Postgres → caching and rate limits… etc.
Empty feed = blank product
An unfollowed account showed a white screen. Lesson: people need content before a social graph → open infinite-scroll feed; indexing, image load, FE performance.
Beyond a Pinterest clone
Browsers already have Pinterest. Creators need monetization and careers → marketplace, then job board.

Stop cloning. Build a pin-license marketplace, then a job board so strong profiles reach employers.

UI started from a basic open-source template I heavily reworked (credits kept). Backend architecture and product scope are mine.

Incomplete seller cash-out Leaner background jobs No production payment ops