Ylanes.

Ylanes inverts the usual social-network shape: instead of broadcast feeds, it's built around small-group conversations — a handful of people, a topic, a room. The product bet is that intimacy, not reach, is what makes online conversation worth having.

Client delivery at Metafic, on the React + TypeScript frontend with a Rails API behind it. Conversation products are mostly frontend products — the difference between a room that feels alive and one that feels dead is in the client.

Anything conversational has two clocks: the durable record (who's in which room, what's scheduled) and the live moment (who's here right now). The durable side belonged to Rails; the live side leaned on Firebase for real-time state. Keeping those two sources of truth from disagreeing — especially around people joining, leaving, and dropping connections mid-conversation — was where the careful engineering went.

React with TypeScript on the client, Ruby on Rails for the core domain and API, Firebase for the real-time layer. A pragmatic split: relational data where consistency matters, a real-time service where latency matters.

Ylanes is live at ylanes.com. It was my first serious exposure to real-time product engineering — the problems I later hit again, with more ownership, in the chat and live features on Dallal and code.rajkar.dev.