032024

PulseChat

Year

2024

Role

Full-stack engineer

Platform

Web · Client project

The problem

Needed a messaging surface with real presence — not just message history, but who's actually online and typing right now.

The product

PulseChat / #project-sync

3 online

Are we still on for the sync at 3?

Yep, pulling the board together now.

Nice, sending the deck over.

Also looped in design on the thread.

Got it — reviewing now, back to you shortly.

Message #project-sync

My role

Built the Socket.io channel architecture, the presence system, and the message persistence layer.

Engineering

architecture

React client over a Node/Express + Socket.io server, with MongoDB as the message store.

frontend

Optimistic message rendering with reconciliation once the server acknowledges the write, so the UI never waits on round-trip latency to feel responsive.

backend

Express handles auth and channel membership; Socket.io owns real-time delivery, typing indicators, and presence broadcast.

cloud

MongoDB stores message history per channel, indexed for fast recent-message pagination.

The hard part

Presence is deceptively hard — a closed tab, a dropped connection, and an idle user all look different to the server but need to resolve to the same offline state without flickering. I added a short server-side grace window before marking a user offline, rather than trusting the disconnect event alone.

The result

Delivered a chat experience where presence and typing state feel instant and reliable, not the flaky half-second-behind feeling most quick Socket.io implementations have.

Next project — ShopFront →