About the Project

Braid is a platform being built as part of a research project affiliated with the University of Michigan seeking to develop digital community spaces where the knowledge and stories of marginalized social innovators are heard, valued, and shared to develop learning communities and technology for the common good.

I was a full-stack developer on the project where I worked to build out user-facing features on the platform. I was part of a small team that included other developers, UX designers, and academic researchers.

My Contributions

• Notification system: notify users when someone replies to their post, mentions them, or connects with them
• Public sharing feature: allow users to share certain posts with a simple URL to those without a Braid account
• 'Book Mode' APIs: backend functionality for the creation of 'books' which are a collection of posts that users can reorder and reorganize into an easily digestible form
• 'reddit-style' delete functionality: mask deleted posts while preserving the original structure of posts and replies
• Bookmark labels: save posts for later and apply labels to them
• Mention other users: users can @mention other users in their posts
• Search for relevant posts: leverage MongoDB indexes to quickly find the most relevant posts among thousands
• Deployment process: enable easier error investigation with pm2 logs, backup database daily with bash script

The tech stack for this project was Next.js on the frontend, MongoDB as the database, and Node.js on the backend. Google Cloud Platform was used to deploy the project to the world.

Screenshots