Writer's Heaven is a full-stack blogging platform engineered as a study in real backend systems work. It started as a CRUD blog and grew into an opinionated demonstration of caching, queues, real-time fan-out, vector search, and structured observability across a stateless API layer.
• Real-time Fan-out: Socket.IO gateways for live comments, reaction counts, and typing indicators, scaled horizontally with a Redis adapter so any instance can deliver events to any connected client. • Cache-aside on Redis: Hot reads (paginated blog lists, single blog, categories, AI summaries) check Redis first with TTL + explicit invalidation; the cache layer fails open so a Redis outage degrades to slower, not broken. • Background Work off the Hot Path: BullMQ-on-Redis workers handle OTP email and a paced semantic-reindex job so the HTTP path returns in milliseconds. • Semantic Search via Qdrant: Blog content is embedded through an OpenAI-compatible provider (Gemini / OpenAI / Ollama) and stored in Qdrant; nearest-neighbour search powers the related-posts endpoint. • Observability Built In: pino structured logs with request-correlation IDs, Prometheus /metrics, OpenTelemetry traces, and Kubernetes-style health probes.
The backend (NestJS) and frontend (Next.js) live in separate repositories — see the GitHub links below.