Sheelatova
A Hebrew Q&A community for young people, with voting, communities, an anonymous mode and real-time private chat.
- Web
The challenge
The goal: a Hebrew space where young people ask real questions and get good answers, with voting, accepted answers, topic communities, an option to ask anonymously, and private messages between users.
The hard part was real-time: private messages that arrive instantly, typing indicators and unread counters, all right to left. Underneath it runs a full Google Cloud stack that scales with load.
Architecture
Stack
- Django
- Channels
- Redis
- WebSockets
- PostgreSQL
- Tailwind
- Cloud Run
- Cloud SQL
- Memorystore
- GCS
- Docker
Hard problems I solved
01 Real-time private chat
- Approach
- Django Channels on Daphne with Redis as the channel layer. Typing indicators, unread counters and right-to-left display fixes.
- Result
- Chat that feels instant, in Hebrew, right to left.
02 Infrastructure that scales itself
- Approach
- Cloud Run autoscaling up to 20 instances, Cloud SQL Postgres, Memorystore Redis over a VPC connector, a regional HTTPS load balancer and Secret Manager.
- Result
- The site scales up and down with load, with no servers to manage.
03 Not starting empty
- Approach
- A content pipeline that used a language model to generate Hebrew questions and answers from several different personas before launch.
- Result
- The first users arrived to a site with content, not an empty page.