The Problem
Open dating platforms suffer from low trust and poor relevance because the user pool is unbounded and unverified.
Building a hyper-local, high-trust environment required restricting access explicitly to verified university domains and building a matching engine optimized for a constrained, dense network of users.
How It Works
System Architecture
Engineering Problems
University-Only Access Control
The entire product premise relies on exclusivity. Allowing non-students to register breaks the fundamental trust mechanism of the platform.
Implemented strict domain whitelisting during authentication. The registration flow intercepts the OAuth payload, verifies the domain suffix against the approved university database, and rejects unauthorized access before a user record is even created.
Real-Time Interaction Synchronization
When users match, expecting them to refresh the page to see new messages leads to terrible engagement and a broken chat experience.
Deployed a WebSocket layer for live bidirectional communication. When a message is sent, it optimisticly updates the UI, persists to the database via API, and broadcasts the event to the recipient's socket connection instantly.
Results
- Strict domain boundaries created a verified, high-trust environment.
- Real-time websocket chat eliminated latency in user conversations.
- Optimized database queries handle complex mutual-like logic efficiently at scale.
Tech Stack
Learnings
Constraint is a feature.
Artificially limiting the userbase to verified domains vastly simplified content moderation and improved matching relevance.
Optimistic UI is mandatory for social.
Users expect chat to be instant. Waiting for database confirmation before rendering a sent message makes the app feel unacceptably sluggish.