Social Events Platform
A social events product that needed stronger real-time foundations, cleaner APIs, and day-to-day technical leadership as the team shipped.
What changed
The team ended up with a more reliable product, clearer patterns for new work, and junior developers who could ship with less hand-holding.
- Proof type
- Client work
- Client
- Mucho Hangouts (Fractional CTO)
- Service
- Fractional CTO + Product Delivery
- Best fit
- Small product teams that need senior technical leadership and stronger foundations without pausing delivery.
- Track
- MVP Build
- Role
- Fractional CTO
- Timeline
- Fractional CTO engagement in 2025
- Team
- 5-person product team, including 2 junior developers
Why it mattered
The platform had grown rapidly with a team of junior developers, accumulating significant technical debt: JavaScript backend with no type safety, React frontend riddled with @ts-nocheck suppressions, fragmented state management, and unreliable real-time features.
Constraints
- The team needed to modernize the codebase without stopping feature delivery.
- Real-time messaging and notifications were unreliable in day-to-day use.
Built with
// What Was Happening
The platform had grown rapidly with a team of junior developers, accumulating significant technical debt: JavaScript backend with no type safety, React frontend riddled with @ts-nocheck suppressions, fragmented state management, and unreliable real-time features.
New feature development was slowing as developers struggled to understand existing code and avoid regressions. The codebase needed modernization without halting product development.
// What I Built
Led a cleanup of the product foundations while the team kept shipping, focusing on clearer API boundaries, more reliable real-time behavior, and a codebase the junior developers could actually extend.
Reworked messaging and notification flows so authentication changes and app state no longer broke core real-time interactions.
Introduced clearer typed patterns across backend and frontend work, which reduced guesswork and gave the team a safer default way to build new features.
Mentored junior developers through code review, pairing, and day-to-day technical direction so the team could ship with less dependency on ad hoc fixes.
// What Changed
The team ended up with a more reliable product, clearer patterns for new work, and junior developers who could ship with less hand-holding.
Messaging and notifications became dependable enough for day-to-day use instead of a recurring source of user frustration.
The codebase and release flow became less fragile, which reduced regressions and made ongoing delivery easier to trust.
Need a first version like this?
If you need a real v1 in front of users without dragging the build out for months, start by scoping the smallest useful version.