Project
The100.io
A social network where video game players find their people — automatic matchmaking into groups, realtime chat, and scheduled gaming sessions, on the web and a native mobile app.
What it is
The100.io solves the oldest problem in online gaming: you want to play, and you need people to play with. It matches players into a group of likeminded people automatically, based on their own criteria, and then gives that group everything it needs to actually play together — realtime chat, private messages, a social feed of the group’s activity, and scheduled gaming sessions that notify everyone when it’s time to show up.
It grew into a fully built-out social network: 30,000+ monthly active users across more than 3,000 groups, generating over 250,000 notifications a month, with traffic spikes as high as 500 concurrent users. The native mobile app holds a 4.7-star rating from 250+ reviews across the iOS App Store and Google Play.
I was the primary developer across the whole thing — the Rails back end and API, the React front end, and the React Native app on both stores — while also managing the volunteer developers and content creators who kept the community running. It predates my AI work, and it’s where I learned what operating a real product with real users actually demands.
How it’s built
- One product, three surfaces
A Ruby on Rails back end and API powering a React web front end and a React Native app for iOS and Android — built, maintained, and deployed by one person, including every release through both app stores. The mobile app is open source.
- Automatic matchmaking
New players don't browse a directory and hope — they're matched into a group automatically based on their criteria. Getting people from sign-up to 'I have a crew' with no manual searching is the product's core move.
- Realtime social infrastructure
Realtime chat and private messaging, friending, unfriending and blocking, and a customized social feed per player — with notifications delivered in-browser, by email, and by push on mobile. At 250,000+ notifications a month, delivery is its own engineering problem.
- Scheduling that rallies the group
Players create, schedule, and search upcoming gaming sessions; the group gets notified automatically when a session they'd care about goes up. The calendar is the heartbeat of every group.
- A custom supporter program
A Patreon-style supporter program, built from scratch with payments handled through Stripe — the community funding the infrastructure it runs on (S3, Heroku, Firebase).