The R&I Guys

A social-media-style app built around automobile garage workflows. Mechanics and owners post about a repair, a replacement or a job in progress, and the post is mostly photographs and video rather than text — which is what makes it a media problem before it is a feed problem.

I built the mobile application on my own. It is a large REST surface — posts, comments, threaded replies, upvotes, pinning, flagging, profiles, business accounts — and every one of those paths goes through React Query, so the list a user is looking at updates from the mutation they just made instead of from a refetch they have to wait for.

Chat is the exception, and deliberately so. Direct messaging, attachments and online presence run on Firestore listeners, because that half of the app genuinely needs a live connection; the feed does not, and a paginated, moderated feed is not something Firestore listeners are good at. Two data layers, each doing the job it is actually suited to.

The media path is the part that took the work: capture or pick, edit in-app, compress, then upload, with the interface staying responsive while a large video is still going up.