We Created a Social Network Inspired by Twitter (X) 🦆!

At the end of 2022, I proposed to my programmer friends Matias Straface and Mesila Hellrigl to create a social network inspired by the then Twitter, and in the first days of 2023, we got started on it.

The name is directly a parody to allude to it being a copy of Twitter (we decided to name it Ducker 🦆).

With the knowledge we had at that time, it wasn’t difficult to advance quickly on the project. In fact, it was progressing much faster than we expected.

In the blink of an eye, we had already completed most of the backend (seriously, in a couple of days of pair programming it was almost 90% done). This was the motivation we needed to put even more determination into the project.

Next, once the Ducker API was finished, we went straight to the visual aspects. We wanted to make it very similar to Twitter; however, we also wanted to experiment on our own, see what we could change, and what we could improve (from our perspective).

Just like with the backend, the frontend progressed quickly. Within a week, most of the views were done, the API connections were ready, and we had the main social network actions functioning: posting Quaks, liking, commenting, and favoriting.

The next part we worked on was the profile section, allowing users to personalize their profile with a photo, name, description, location, interests, and more. This part didn’t pose a major challenge for Team Ducker; by this point, we were very comfortable working on the project.

From then on, it was all about refining details, improving visual aspects, and fixing bugs (which surprisingly weren’t many).

Oh, of course, the stack is the usual: TypeScript, JavaScript, NodeJS, React, SASS, Express, JWT, MongoDB, Google Auth Library, Cors, WebSockets, and others.

I want to thank my Team Ducker mates Mati and Meli, first of all for joining the project, second because when we transitioned to the frontend, my CSS skills weren’t as developed as they are now. They were incredibly patient and explained things to me gradually, and third, for being so cool and making this project a very enjoyable and fun experience.