A university social platform · Product & engineering
I designed, built, and launched Inlooveu: a place for university students to discover people, express their interests, and turn a first connection into a conversation.
Historical MongoDB count recorded by the founder. This is a registration count, not an active-user metric.
About this number ↓01 / A product in motion
120-second walkthroughSpanish narration, with English and Spanish captions. Cards and profile views use original public details and photos in a local copy. Registration uses sample inputs; chat is a controlled local exchange.
02 / The experience
A journey from the registration forms to profiles, discovery, and messaging. The form walkthrough stops before final submission.
Email and password begin the flow. Name, date of birth, faculty, degree, semester, and preferences lead to a biography and interests. This walkthrough stops before final submission.
Registration forms · Academic details · Preferences and interestsEmail-confirmed registration, multiple photos, a biography, and a catalog of interests give people a way to introduce themselves. Photo cropping happens in the browser.
Account lifecycle · Profiles · Canvas image preparationDiscovery uses gender preference and confirmed profiles. Cards support mouse and touch interactions; likes and reciprocity lead people toward a conversation.
Preference-based discovery · Likes · Reciprocity detectionOpen the lower detail control to read the biography, degree, semester, and interests without leaving the card. Photos change within the same card.
Photo gallery · Expandable biography · InterestsMessages are saved in MongoDB before the client emits the saved record through Socket.IO. Returning to a conversation loads its history through the API.
Persistent messages · Real-time events · Restored history03 / Engineering notes
The central decision: a live event distributes a message; the database preserves the conversation. Those responsibilities stay distinct.
Socket.IOdistributes the saved message
The API retrieves the history on return
The client waits for the message POST to succeed before emitting its result. A separate history request restores the stored conversation. Delivery acknowledgments and retry deduplication would be separate reliability improvements.
Email verification, JWT sessions, bcrypt password hashing, and account recovery connect the onboarding experience to the private application. An institutional-domain badge is separate from email confirmation.
Canvas prepares cropped profile photos in the browser; external storage handles the resulting files. A windowed interest selector supports a large catalog without rendering every option at once.
04 / Ownership over time
My role covered product decisions, interface design, frontend, backend, and deployment. The original launch and the 2026 recovery are two distinct stages of that work.
Original product
React and TypeScript on the frontend; Express, Socket.IO, and MongoDB behind the account and conversation flows. The static frontend and API used Render, with a custom domain, S3 photos, and SMTP email.
Product design · Full-stack development · Cloud deployment
Recovery / 2026
The recovery preserves the existing MongoDB accounts and messages. Docker, Caddy, and HTTPS run on an existing Hetzner server. New photos use the existing Cloudinary account; email uses SMTP with mandatory STARTTLS.
Session and chat-membership controls · Private-field protection · Maintenance
The local walkthrough uses accessible original Cloudinary photos. Historical S3 photos remain unavailable and their references are preserved; new uploads use Cloudinary.
The founder recorded 1,800 registered accounts in a historical MongoDB count on another computer. That count is owner-reported and was not independently reproduced during the 2026 recovery.
A separate preserved export contains 681 account records and 2,129 distinct, nonempty stored messages. It describes a different cut of the application’s history; those messages must not be presented as the same cohort or period as the 1,800-account count.
The preserved export includes missing account and chat references. Registration records are not unique-person verification, and no MAU, DAU, or retention claim is made. Overlapping backups are not added together.
Pierre Burciaga / Software engineer
An account is required to explore the private features.