Roadith
Trip Stories & Social Platform
Overview
Roadith is a full-featured social platform that redefines how travel experiences are planned, shared, and discovered. Built as the companion to Roadith Maps, it enables users to convert structured itineraries into dynamic social posts, explore authentic travel stories, and build a presence within a community of explorers.
From trip planning to feed engagement, Roadith delivers an experience that's as thoughtful on the backend as it is engaging on the frontend—optimized for performance, scalability, and discoverability.
Project Goals
- Empower users to share trips as visual stories, connecting planning with meaningful content.
- Build a high-performance, SEO-friendly web app that ranks organically and previews beautifully across platforms.
- Ensure fast initial rendering and responsive feed browsing, even on mobile and slower connections.
- Provide robust user personalization—from interface theming to localization and account controls.
Key Features
Trip-to-Post Publishing
Travelers can convert their detailed itineraries into rich, media-driven posts that others can view, engage with, and remix.
Precomputed Personalized Feed
A backend job system periodically generates feed data for active users, caching it for immediate access on first load—ensuring a responsive experience without sacrificing freshness.
Visual Content-Centric Design
Posts highlight photo galleries, routes, location notes, and reviews in a scrollable, mobile-optimized layout.
Profile System
Users can follow others, browse shared trips on profile pages, and manage personal details including name, avatar, password, and social visibility.
Explore Page & Search
Elastic-powered discovery system supports rich filters (e.g., location, duration, keywords) for finding trips and users.
Personalization & Settings
Supports dark/light theme switching, language selection, secure login and registration, and user profile customization.
SEO Optimization
Integrated OpenGraph metadata for rich link previews and JSON-LD structured data to support search engine indexing.
Tech Stack
Frontend
Next.js
React
Tailwind CSS
Headless UIBackend
Node.js
Express.js
Redis
MongoDBInfrastructure & Others
Docker
Elasticsearch
JWT
Prometheus
Kibana
AWS S3Testing
Jest
PlaywrightChallenges & Learnings
- Rendering Strategy for SEO and Performance: Built with SSR-first architecture in Next.js, enabling full meta tag and structured data injection for each post and profile. Balanced dynamic content with static rendering to improve Google indexing without impacting user interactivity.
- Feed Responsiveness at Scale: Rendering a personalized feed on every request was costly and slow. I implemented a batch processing system that calculates and caches feeds in advance, balancing freshness with speed—especially for mobile-first users.
- Trip-to-Post Content Modeling: Needed a flexible schema that could represent structured trip data while also supporting rich, freeform content suitable for public posts and OpenGraph preview generation.
- Security & UX in User Management: Focused on seamless user experience while handling sensitive operations like password updates and session handling with secure JWT flows and backend validation.
Outcome
Roadith evolved into a social platform that feels as intuitive as Instagram, yet grounded in utility through real-world itinerary data:
- Improved initial load performance by over 60% with feed caching strategy.
- Enhanced organic discoverability via structured metadata and OpenGraph previews.
- High engagement rates with trip-to-post content, reinforcing the loop between planning and sharing.
- Social features boosted retention, with profile browsing and following increasing repeat visits.
- Solid SEO foundation helped Roadith grow organically, ensuring posts indexed well on search engines and rendered accurately across platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter.
