Iteration 4: Social Features

Major Developments

• Followers implemented
• Discover Screen
• Public profile updated

Having never built a social media platform this was cool to build something out and see all the intricacies of follower-based architecture. Cascading deletes, limits on who can follow who (no self-follows), etc... were all super interseting to learn about.

Additionally, it sparked a lot of thought around how I want users to interact with social media. On a previous project I was temporarily a part of, we tried to move away from the pressure of gaining likes and followers. I want to carry that to this project too, and have it focus on individual growth, but still have some semblance of community.

Decisions

I leaned on Claude for a lot of these decisions, balancing pros/cons with ChatGPT for things I was unsure on. Some small decisions were made around profile layout and how users will interact with the follower information, but I'm also anticipating this will update in the near future. This is definitely just another set of "get something out the door" and we'll refine once we have an MVP out there.

Next

Planning to focus on some non-feature based stuff next. Logging and a landing page ideally, something that I can start to proactively set up before continuing on feature development.