Btalk — A Social Media App

Btalk is a social media application where conversations happen live: posts, feeds, and a chat layer where messages appear the instant they are sent.

What I built

The entire backend with Django REST Framework — users, posts, feeds, and the social graph — plus a real-time messaging layer on Django Channels and WebSockets. Presence indicators and live chat state were persisted to PostgreSQL so nothing was lost on reconnect.

Infrastructure

• Deployed on an AWS EC2 instance, with media assets stored in S3.
• CloudFront as the CDN in front of the app for fast asset delivery worldwide.
• ASGI serving both HTTP requests and WebSocket connections from a single deployment.

What I learned

Real-time changes your data model. Designing for “what does the client see when a message arrives mid-scroll” taught me more about API design than any REST endpoint ever did.