Khotwah Academy is powered by a lean, high-performance back end built with NestJS on Fastify, all sitting on a MySQL foundation. I designed normalized schemas for users, courses, livestream sessions, purchase records, and watch-history, complete with foreign-key constraints and indexed lookup fields so queries stay sub-100 ms even under peak load. Authentication is JWT-based with role guards (students vs. instructors vs. admins), and I integrated payment gateways (Stripe/PayPal) for course purchases and subscription management. Live sessions use WebSocket gateways in NestJS for real-time chat and Q&A, while recorded lessons are fetched via secure, expiring URLs. Everything’s containerized for easy scaling and sits behind CI/CD pipelines that run tests, linting, and zero-downtime deploys on every git push—because nothing kills momentum like a broken build.
On the front end, Next.js drives both the marketing site and the course portal, blending server-side rendering and static generation for super-snappy loads and SEO juice. The homepage hero, category filter, and “Latest”/“Bestsellers” carousels are all SSR for instant first paint, while client-side hydration powers interactive filters, paginated course lists, and that slick “Start Learning” flow. Course detail pages spin up videos via Next/Image-optimized players, and a custom live-session component pops in a chat sidebar once the instructor goes live. There’s a seamless login/signup modal, newsletter opt-in, and a fully responsive, mobile-first design—because learning on the go should feel effortless.