A social, dating, and live-streaming app — designed, built, and run end-to-end across six codebases and five languages, by one engineer.
Gypsy Live folds four products into one app — Tinder-style swipe dating, an Instagram-style social feed, Twitch-style live streaming, and a virtual-currency economy — live on the App Store and Google Play in 29 languages.
I designed and built the entire stack alone since July 2025: the Flutter client, the Laravel API and admin panel, a Go realtime service, a Python video transcoder, three Cloudflare Workers, and the Docker infrastructure beneath them. Six codebases, five languages — no team, no inherited code.
It runs in production today with live streaming, paid subscriptions, in-app purchases, and push — backed by a tiered media pipeline that pre-warms hot video across 300+ Cloudflare edge locations every 30 minutes. The product feels calm because the plumbing is.
Here is how data actually moves. Flutter is the only client. Laravel owns persistence, auth, and billing. Go carries realtime. Python re-encodes video. Three Cloudflare Workers sit at the edge — all on a Docker stack I deploy myself.
67 screens · 32 service modules · MVVM (Stacked) + GetX
REST API + Blade admin panel · 20+ controllers · 522 routes · queue worker
WebSocket fan-out · Redis pub/sub · presence · chat · live signaling
HLS encode · quality variants · thumbnails · upload to R2
smart TTL by media age and hotness
pushes hot video to 300+ edge locations every 30 min
HTTP-Range archival for cold media
The shipped product feels calm. Getting there did not — these four are the engineering behind it.
I rewrote the feed read path — batch queries, selective SELECT, bounded eager-loading, and seven composite indexes tuned to the real query shapes. Response time fell from 3–5s to 0.3–0.6s, a 90% cut, with no change to the API surface.
A 35-controller pool with adaptive concurrency pre-warms upcoming feed videos; an adaptive-HLS pipeline pre-caches the first segment for ~1s startup. Triple-engine Agora orchestration swaps between live rooms in under a second. I forked flutter_video_caching to fix iOS proxy-restart on backgrounding.
A smart-TTL cache in front of R2; a pre-warmer that pushes the next batch of hot video to every edge location on a 30-minute cron; and an HTTP-Range archiver that streams cold media without paying full-egress cost.
A WebSocket hub on Gin with Redis pub/sub fan-out — carrying presence, chat, gift events, and live-room signaling. Decoupled from PHP so API restarts never kick a room; the client auto-reconnects up to 10 times.
Reported from production — App Store and Google Play listings, the Laravel route table, and the internal build counter. Snapshot taken May 2026.
