SpotLight is a React Native fullstack social sharing platform I built to deepen my understanding of mobile development and backend integration.
While this project was inspired by a React Native tutorial, I decided to reimagine the entire backend from scratch to gain hands-on experience designing a real-world system end to end.
📱 Mobile App: Built with React Native
🗄️ Custom Backend:
- User authentication & authorization
- RESTful API routes
- Database migrations and schema design
⚡ State Management: Implemented with Zustand
🔒 Secure Authentication: Replaced Clerk with my own auth logic
🧩 Convex Replaced: Fully custom backend logic instead of Convex
🛠️ Full CRUD Operations for posts and user profiles
I didn’t want this to be just another tutorial project.
Instead, I used the tutorial as a launchpad to build everything backend-related myself, including:
- Designing the database
- Writing all APIs
- Handling authentication
- Structuring state management
This helped me bridge the gap between theory and practical, production-ready development.
The backend folder structure is intentionally simple and not heavily modularized. My main focus was to practice React Native frontend integration, rather than polishing backend architecture in this project.
Coming soon: Setup instructions and local installation guide.
This project was primarily for personal learning, but feel free to fork or open issues for discussion.