# Built the platform's social layer — posts, feed, groups, mentions, a follower graph and an occasions digest — on the same function‑first data layer as the rest of the product. 2025 **Situation.** A directory of companies is a reference work. People check it and leave. What makes a professional platform worth returning to is other people being on it — which means posts, groups and a reason to come back that is not an email telling you to. **Task.** A social layer had to be added without it becoming a second system with its own rules, its own permissions and its own way of storing things. **Action.** Posts, a feed, groups, mentions, a follower graph and an occasions digest went in across 188 commits, all of it on the same function‑first data layer as the rest of the platform. That constraint did most of the work: the follower graph is tables and functions like everything else, a mention resolves through the same identity schema the directory uses, and a post inherits the moderation queue already built for reviews. Nothing here needed its own store or its own permission model. The feed is the one place that pushed back, because assembling a personalised timeline efficiently is a genuinely different problem from fetching a row, and it is where the personalization and discovery work earns its place. **Result.** The platform has a reason to be opened on a day when nobody needs to look a company up, and it arrived without a parallel stack to maintain. Whether a social layer is the right investment for a maritime directory is a product question rather than an engineering one — it is here because the product asked for it, and it is built the same way as everything around it. --- - Role: Full Stack Engineer - Categories: [Backend Engineering](https://engineer.company/categories/backend/), [Frontend Engineering](https://engineer.company/categories/frontend/), [Full‑Stack Development](https://engineer.company/categories/full-stack/), [Web Development](https://engineer.company/categories/web-development/), [Databases](https://engineer.company/categories/databases/), [Product & Requirements](https://engineer.company/categories/product/) - Services: [Backend & API Development](https://engineer.company/services/backend-development/), [Full‑Stack Product Development](https://engineer.company/services/full-stack-development/), [Product Strategy & Requirements](https://engineer.company/services/product-strategy/)