Getting file storage to work on a full-stack app is harder than tutorials make it look. 😅

Prasanna — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:32:08 +0000

While building Vidyari—a digital platform I'm developing for study materials and courses—I hit a major architecture wall. Users needed to upload heavy PDFs and video lectures, but pushing massive files directly through my Node.js and Express backend was eating up server memory and causing timeouts.

I quickly realized the server shouldn't be the middleman for heavy lifting.
To solve the bottleneck, I completely re-architected the upload flow using AWS S3 Multipart Uploads. Here is how it works now:

1️⃣ The client requests a secure presigned URL from the backend.

2️⃣ The large file is sliced into smaller chunks on the frontend.

3️⃣ Those chunks are uploaded in parallel directly to the S3 bucket—completely bypassing my Node server.

The best part? If a user's Wi-Fi drops at 99%, the system only retries the failed chunk instead of starting the entire upload over from scratch.

Building Vidyari is teaching me that making something work locally is just step one.
Designing it to handle real-world conditions without crashing is the actual challenge.

For the backend devs out there: what's your go-to strategy for handling large media uploads efficiently? Would love to hear your insights! 👇

what to check out real word postmortems 👀

https://www.devsolved.com

BuildInPublic #NodeJS #AWS #BackendDevelopment #WebDevelopment #StudentDeveloper

DevSolved

Prasanna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:40:05 +0000

https://www.devsolved.com **I Built a Place to Share Engineering Investigations, Not Just Solutions

When I get stuck on a production issue, I usually find one of three things:

A Stack Overflow answer with no explanation.
A blog that skips the debugging process.
Documentation that tells me what to do, but not how someone actually figured it out.

What I really want is the story behind the fix.
What were the symptoms?
What hypotheses failed?
What logs were checked?
What was the actual root cause?
Why did the final solution work?
That's why I started building DevSolved.

The idea is simple:
Instead of publishing tutorials, document the entire engineering investigation.

Think of it as a collection of:
Production incidents
Debugging journeys
Root cause analyses
Architecture decisions
Lessons learned after fixing real systems
The goal isn't to replace Stack Overflow or documentation.

It's to preserve the engineering thinking that usually disappears once the bug is fixed.

I'm still building and improving the platform, and I'd genuinely love feedback from fellow developers.

What kind of engineering investigation would you find most valuable to read?
**

DEV Community: Prasanna

Getting file storage to work on a full-stack app is harder than tutorials make it look. 😅

BuildInPublic #NodeJS #AWS #BackendDevelopment #WebDevelopment #StudentDeveloper

DevSolved