HIBRID — Real Time Messaging & Community Platform
Overview
HIBRID is a social platform combining private messaging, encrypted conversations, public discussion rooms and paid audience Q&A. I built and owned the entire backend — TypeScript and Node.js services deployed on AWS — for roughly 18 months as the sole backend engineer, from implementation through deployment and production support.
The Challenge
The platform needed real time messaging that stayed reliable on patchy mobile connections, public discussion rooms where active participation was capped but a wider audience could still follow and react, and a payments layer that could route money from paid audience questions straight to group owners — all without a dedicated backend team.
Results & Impact
Delivered Node.js WebSocket services (Socket.io with a Redis adapter) for real time messaging and notifications, and public rooms where active participation was limited to 10 invited or first come users while additional members could follow and react. Built Stripe one time payment and payout flows routing money from paid questions to group owners. Improved mobile reliability with heartbeat monitoring, server side ping checks, reconnect handling and fallback in app notifications, and investigated memory leaks and AWS cost spikes as part of ongoing production stability and deployment support.
Conclusion
HIBRID shows how a single engineer can own a full real time, payments enabled backend end to end — from WebSocket infrastructure to production cost control.