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Sairaj Jadhav
Sairaj Jadhav

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Building a Production-Style Video Sharing Platform Backend with Node.js, Express & MongoDB

🚀 Completed a Production-Style Video Sharing Platform Backend API
Over the past few weeks, I've been building a backend system inspired by modern video-sharing platforms using Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, and Cloudinary.

This project went far beyond CRUD operations and helped me understand how real backend systems are designed.

Features Implemented:
✅ JWT Authentication & Refresh Token Rotation
✅ Secure HTTP-Only Cookie Based Sessions
✅ Video Upload & Cloudinary Integration
✅ Comment System
✅ Like System (Videos, Comments, Tweets)
✅ Subscription System
✅ Playlist Management
✅ Watch History Tracking
✅ Creator Dashboard Analytics
✅ Pagination & Aggregation Pipelines

Key Things I Learned:
🔹 Authentication using Access & Refresh Tokens
🔹 Designing relationships in MongoDB
🔹 MongoDB Aggregation Pipelines ($lookup, $group, $project, $addFields)
🔹 Ownership-Based Authorization
🔹 Cloudinary Media Management
🔹 Cascade Cleanup Logic
🔹 Building consistent API response structures

Interesting Debugging Challenges:
Duplicate MongoDB index issues
Populate path errors
Refresh token validation flow
Route mismatches
Aggregation pipeline bugs
Watch history synchronization
Video deletion cleanup across collections

Documentation Created:
📖 Complete API Documentation
🔐 Authentication Flow Documentation
🗄️ Database Schema Documentation

What's Next?
Building the React frontend and converting this into a complete full-stack application.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/SairajJadhav08/Video-Sharing-Platform-API

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