UrNews: Rebuilding a Social News Platform from the Ground Up

UrNews, a Finnish social news aggregation app, had a backend that wasn't built to scale. The existing architecture caused instability under load, limited feature development velocity, and was running expensive infrastructure on AWS that didn't match the team's actual needs.

Beyond stability, the product needed new capabilities — push notifications, a social layer, user profiles, and a dramatically improved news feed — to grow its audience. The technical foundation had to be fixed before any of that could happen at speed.

I came in as Acting CTO and executed a full technical overhaul across multiple phases:

• Backend Rewrite: Reconfigured the entire backend in Golang — significantly smaller, faster, and purpose-built for the app's actual traffic patterns.
• Infrastructure Migration: Migrated from AWS to DigitalOcean, reducing hosting costs significantly while improving operational simplicity.
• Push Notifications: Designed and implemented a push notification system for real-time news headlines delivery to mobile users.
• Social & Profiler Components: Built the social layer and user profiling system from scratch, enabling community features within the platform.
• Feed Expansion: Expanded news feed consumption capabilities to handle more sources with better reliability.
• Dashboard Redesign: Delivered a newly designed multifunctional dashboard that streamlined internal operations for the team.

The engagement ran for over two years across multiple contracts — a signal of the sustained value delivered:

• Cost Reduction: The AWS → DigitalOcean migration reduced infrastructure costs significantly, freeing budget for product development.
• Platform Stability: The backend rewrite eliminated the reliability issues that had been limiting user growth and advertiser confidence.
• Feature Velocity: New components — social, profiler, push notifications, expanded feeds — shipped reliably on a clean architecture.
• Long-term Partnership: The client renewed the engagement across multiple contracts and left a 5-star review: "Nasim is very talented, especially in Golang, and is valuable to any organisation that needs additional hands to complete backend development projects."