Developer Builds Full-Stack Social Media App ConnectNow, Shares Lessons Learned

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A developer built ConnectNow, a full-stack social media platform featuring posts, messaging, profiles, and real-time interactions, as a hands-on way to learn real-world development. The app uses a decoupled three-tier architecture with a React frontend on Vercel, a Node.js/Express backend on Render, and a MongoDB Atlas database. Authentication is handled via JWT and Google OAuth, while Cloudinary was adopted for image storage after Render's ephemeral filesystem caused uploaded files to disappear on dyno restarts. The MongoDB schema was normalized using arrays of referenced IDs rather than embedded documents to improve memory efficiency and scalability. The project was shared on DEV Community as a detailed account of the challenges and decisions involved in building and deploying a production-grade application.

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