Writer's Heaven

Overview

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.

Highlights

• 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.

Built with

• NestJS
• Next.js 14
• TypeScript
• MongoDB
• Mongoose
• Redis
• BullMQ
• Socket.IO
• Qdrant
• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus
• Cloudinary
• JWT Auth