961

The Challenge

961 isn't one application. It's a web app, a mobile app, a news algorithm, a chat service, an ads manager, analytics, workspaces and several ML services, each in its own repository. A platform that size accumulates drift: branches that never merged cleanly, inconsistencies between services, and infrastructure decisions made early that stop fitting once traffic grows. My work has been on that layer, keeping a large system coherent and getting it onto footing it can grow on.

The Solution

Moving from MongoDB to PostgreSQL

The largest piece of work. A document store and a relational database want data shaped differently, so this wasn't a copy across: it meant modelling the platform's entities properly, reworking the queries that depended on the old shape, and doing it on a system already serving live traffic. Relational integrity matters for a platform where news, channels, users and ads all reference each other.

Owning the deployment

I took the backend through full deployment on AWS with Cloudflare in front of it. For a news platform, traffic is spiky by nature: a breaking story arrives with a load pattern nothing else in the week resembles, so caching and edge delivery aren't optimisations, they're what keeps the site up on the day it matters most.

The unglamorous half

Merges, cleanup, bug fixes and UI tweaks across a lot of services. None of it demos well, but a thirteen-repository platform lives or dies on whether someone keeps the branches reconciled and the rough edges filed down. That maintenance work is most of what separates a codebase a team can still ship from one that has quietly become untouchable.

The platform is live and public at 961.co, with iOS and Android apps. The repositories are private, so there's no source link here.

Key Features

• ▸Work spanning thirteen repositories covering web, mobile, backend services, ML and ads
• ▸Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
• ▸Full backend deployment on AWS
• ▸Cloudflare in front of the platform
• ▸Branch merges and codebase cleanup across services
• ▸Bug fixes and UI/UX refinements on the user-facing app