MessBuddy: a full product suite for shared-housing management

Overview

A platform for managing shared houses ("messes"): members, meals, bills and balances, with a NestJS + Prisma API, a Next.js web app, a React Native app and a super-admin panel. Real-time updates over Socket.IO, background jobs on BullMQ, PDF statements.

The problem

Four surfaces sharing one source of truth, with money and meal counts that have to reconcile across all of them, and an operator who needs to diagnose and fix production without an engineer on call.

What I built

• NestJS + Prisma API with Socket.IO for live balance updates and BullMQ for bill generation and notifications.
• PDF statements generated server-side.
• Next.js web app (Firebase auth, Zustand) and React Native app on the same API.
• Docker + nginx deployment on a VPS via GitHub Actions, plus operational runbooks as workflows: `vps-diagnostics` and `vps-fix-bill-balances`, runnable from the Actions tab.

Outcome

Engineering decisions

• Operations as code: diagnostics and data repair as GitHub Actions
• One API, four clients