HomelyHub 🏠

HomelyHub is a role-based housing platform where users can create, browse, and manage property listings, with permissions enforced based on user roles.

It is a full-stack web application built to explore backend system design, role-based access control, and data consistency in a multi-user environment.

The project focuses on engineering correctness, clean APIs, and scalable backend structure, rather than UI complexity.

Motivation

Many real-world applications require:

• multiple user roles with different permissions
• secure authentication and authorization
• consistent data handling across users
• clear separation between business logic and persistence

HomelyHub was built to implement and reason about these concerns in an end-to-end system.

Architecture

The application follows a standard client–server architecture:

• Frontend: React-based client for user interaction
• Backend: Node.js + Express REST API enforcing authentication and authorization
• Database: MongoDB with schema-driven design

Backend code is organized to keep routing, business logic, and data models loosely coupled.

Key Features

• Role-based authentication and authorization
• Secure login and access control via middleware
• RESTful API design with clear resource boundaries
• Modular backend structure for maintainability
• Database schemas designed for consistency and integrity

Engineering Focus

This project emphasizes:

• Correctness: preventing unauthorized access and invalid state
• Scalability: API and data model design that can evolve with usage
• Maintainability: clean abstractions and separation of concerns

The goal was to understand system behavior under realistic usage and edge cases.

Tradeoffs

• Prioritized clarity and correctness over aggressive optimization
• Designed for learning and experimentation, not production deployment
• Limited frontend complexity to keep focus on backend engineering

Tech Stack

• MongoDB
• Express.js
• React
• Node.js

Running Locally

# install dependencies
npm install

# start backend
npm run server

# start frontend
npm start

What I Learned

• Designing and enforcing role-based access control
• Structuring REST APIs for clarity and extensibility
• Handling authentication and authorization as system-level concerns
• Thinking about correctness and failure modes in backend systems

Future Improvements

• Add automated tests for critical backend logic
• Improve handling of concurrent requests
• Finer-grained permission models
• Additional security hardening