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Visit Engage

Engage is a short video social platform backed by a development team I am leading, which we decided to work on for our capstone senior project. We were inspired to start the project due to the numerous issues currently surrounding short form content, and the issues that took place at the time of starting development:

• TikTok’s potential ban at the time
• Other competitors have outdated / poor content in comparison to TikTok
• Privacy concerns
• Major competitors do not specialize in short form content

The application has numerous features despite the numerous challenges and short time frame we had to develop it. Features include user authentication, liking videos, downloading, database management, conditional rendering, mobile optimization, email verification, password resets, and having all videos transcoded so they can play on all platforms (e.g. Linux).

Over recent weeks, the application has gone through a major overhaul. The app has had numerous frontend and backend upgrades, and is rapidly getting close to a state for presentation. The application is currently open for anyone to sign up.

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Once we hit presentation, the application was in a pretty good state. The application had working user accounts, comments, following, and moderation actions. We also upgraded the node to have its own media storage, and more resources dedicated specifically to Engage.

I appreciate my team for sticking around the hiccups, successes, downfalls, and triumphs. The team and their contributions are recognized here. We ended up turning Engage from a “TikTok clone” to its own brand identity full of a collection of edgy memes / content.

I plan to continue Engage development over the summer, with at least one new team member and most of the original developers. We plan to solidify our backend, come up with a more organized development environment, and strengthen our platforms security and performance.