Volunteerium — volunteer events platform
Career-transition capstone: a seven-person, three-month MERN team product. Early proof of backend ownership (~95%), auth, realtime, and shipping a live platform—not a claim of current production engineering level.
Context
Finding local volunteer opportunities and recruiting reliable helpers is fragmented across chat groups and informal networks. Organizers lacked a focused product to publish events, manage interest, and communicate in realtime.
Constraints
Built in three months full-time with a seven-person Clarusway team — from BRD/ERD and Figma through coding, debugging, and manual QA to production launch.
Ownership
Owned ~95% of the backend (APIs, auth, realtime, file storage, docs) and ~40% of the frontend, including the admin panel, Google OAuth, and reCAPTCHA flows.
Approach
Designed REST APIs with Node.js/Express and MongoDB; added JWT + Passport authentication, Google OAuth, and reCAPTCHA; stored media on AWS S3; shipped Socket.IO for realtime collaboration; documented APIs with Swagger/ReDoc; and built React/Redux/Vite/Tailwind UI with Formik/Yup validation, i18next, and Nodemailer notifications.
Outcome
Shipped a live bilingual-ready volunteer platform at volunteerium.com — discoverable events, organizer tools, admin controls, and realtime features used as the team’s production capstone.