Build Reddit Slowly

Build a Reddit-like app as if it is brand new.

Start with a logged-out feed from seeded PostgreSQL posts. Keep the system cheap, simple, and understandable until traffic proves which parts need to be rewritten.

Start Phase 1 Learn the basics first

Course Method

Prompt, run, inspect, paste the real error, repeat.

The course teaches coding through a modern AI workflow. You use Codex to move quickly, but you still learn the concepts needed to steer the work, read failures, and make better decisions.

  • Frontend errors often come from the Chrome or Firefox console and network tab.
  • Backend errors often come from the terminal running the Go server.
  • Database errors often come from PostgreSQL setup, migrations, seed data, or SQL queries.
  • Production errors eventually need telemetry: logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and error tracking.

Complete Course Arc

One 90-day MVP, then ten more 90-day phases toward serious scale.

These are course stubs now. Each phase has its own page, section anchors, previous/next navigation, and a consistent path back home.

Phase 1 90-day tiny MVP React, Vite, Go, PostgreSQL, seeded posts, comments, accounts, voting, and first deploy. Phase 2 Communities and posting Community pages, moderators, rules, text posts, link posts, slugs, and authorization. Phase 3 Comments become real Threaded replies, comment votes, collapsing trees, deleted states, and tree modeling. Phase 4 Moderation and safety Reports, removals, bans, mod queues, audit trails, and role-based access control. Phase 5 Search and discovery Post search, community search, explore pages, PostgreSQL full-text search, and ranking basics. Phase 6 Media and storage Image posts, avatars, link previews, object storage, MIME checks, and CDN basics. Phase 7 Notifications and workers Reply notifications, email, queues, retries, workers, idempotency, and dead-letter queues. Phase 8 Caching and performance Hot feeds, Redis or Valkey, TTLs, cache invalidation, rate limits, and load testing. Phase 9 Ranking and personalization Hot sorting, subscribed feeds, time decay, batch jobs, and materialized views. Phase 10 Reliability and operations Logs, metrics, traces, alerts, backups, rollbacks, OpenTelemetry, and incident practice. Phase 11 Scaling toward millions Read replicas, partitioning, service boundaries, replication lag, consistency, and sharding tradeoffs.