Discussion Flow - Changing how we engage in Discussions

Discussion Flow makes your discussions and talks more engaging by giving your audience a digital space to share their thoughts, and ask their questions, and like questions asked by others. The easiest way to engage questions during your Discussions & Talks.

Project Details

Full-Stack

My Role

8/1/2025

Project Start Date

10/15/2025

Project End Date

Home Page - Job It

Dashboard - Job It

Discussion - Job It

Project Overview

I was speaking to a friend over the phone, he was describing a discussion group that a church he visted held. He was telling me about some of the topics that were covered and some interesting questions that came up. During our call he sent me a link that contained all the questions that were asked during that church discussion group. I looked at the application and thought "what a cool idea". I decided to build my own, but with more features. I am always looking for cool ideas to build, and this was one of them.

Technology Profile

This is a full-stack SaaS application. Next.js for the frontend, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Railway, Cloudinary, and Stripe for the backend.

Next.js

Node.js

Express

Cloudinary

Railway

Stripe

Challenges

Challenges are what make projects worthwhile. Being able to learn/take something away from this project that can be used in another is what makes for a competent developer:

The biggest challenge was properly logging out users when their login sessions had expired. Knowing when to check the validity of logins so as not keep users logged in while their session has expired.

Learnings & Takeaways

I worked with many new technologies/tools while working on this project. The takeaways were many, but I have condensed the key ones below.

WebSockets. This was my first time implementing an application with websockets. It is a really cool technology that I have heard of, but did not need to use until implementing a live chat feature.
Properly disconnecting WebSockets was also important to free up web servers
Initially, I deployed this application using Vercel, and my websockets stopped connecting. After doing research I realized that Vercel by architecture is serverless. That is to say that servers are on-demand, running functions when called and then shutting down. Websockets in contrast need persistent servers, so - I moved my backend to RailWay.
Email only Authentication. In this project I implemented email only authentication. I did this to keep logging in easy for users with no need to rememeber any passwords. Email deliverability became crtical. Things like not using a noreply email, using a subdomain, settingn up DMARC.
Profile images were stored in Cloudinary. Deleting and replacing images to converse storage space in Cloudinary was a great takeaway.
Stripe Integration. Working with stripe is always a delight. Properly handling and managing subscriptions was another great takeaway.

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