A full-stack community platform combining channels, direct messages, audio and video calls, presence, and screen sharing in a responsive experience.
Case study
01
Cyclone starts with a simple problem that is difficult to execute well: bringing text conversations and audio-video communication into one product without losing consistency across permissions and navigation. It is neither client work nor affiliated with Discord.
02
Synchronize messages, presence, and media in real time while keeping identity, application data, and audio-video transport clearly separated.
03
I assigned each responsibility to the most suitable service: Clerk for identity, Next.js for APIs and access control, Supabase for data and private events, and LiveKit for media using short-lived server-generated tokens.
04
This separation keeps media traffic out of Next.js and makes responsibilities easier to understand. The tradeoff is coordinating several services, secrets, permissions, and connection states.
05
The deployed version covers text and voice channels, direct conversations, webcam, screen sharing, roles, moderation, and responsive navigation. I do not claim usage metrics that have not been measured.
Key points
Messages, presence, and conversations update without reloads, with private channels aligned with each member’s permissions.
Authentication, data, and media transport remain decoupled so that each layer has a focused responsibility.
The journey covers creating a space, chatting, moderation, and moving naturally from text to audio or video.
Critical perspective
Current limitation
Cyclone remains a demonstration: automated test coverage needs expanding, rate limiting is stored in memory, and some presence states are refreshed periodically.
Next step
Add automated multi-account user journeys and move rate limiting to shared storage before considering distributed load.