CampusBay: Building a Production Student Marketplace, Solo
Five containerized services, real-time messaging, an escrow-style wallet, revocable authentication, and SSL: designed, built, and hosted entirely by myself. This is the full story of how every hard part fits together.
Trade between students on campus is a mess. It lives in overflowing WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels where listings scroll past in minutes, nobody knows if the seller is trustworthy, and payment is an awkward manual bank transfer with zero protection. If you pay and the item never shows up, you have no recourse and no record.
I could have built a pretty listings page and called it a marketplace. Plenty of portfolio projects stop there. But a listings page isn't the hard part, the hard part is everything that makes a marketplace trustworthy: knowing who you're talking to, talking to them in real time, paying safely, and having the system hold a consistent record of money even when things go wrong.
The "host it myself" constraint was deliberate. Managed platforms hide the parts I most wanted to learn: SSL, reverse proxying, container networking, what actually happens when one service falls over at 2am. If something breaks, it's mine to diagnose and fix, and that's where the learning lives.
Over the next sessions I'll walk through each layer in the order I actually had to think about it: why five services, how the data is modeled, the real-time layer, authentication, payments, the wallet ledger, deployment, and the failure modes that taught me the most.
