FlashYourMeme

Problem

I was jumping into a live production codebase written by someone else in a stack I hadn't worked with seriously before. Starting to edit without understanding the flow was a reliable way to break things I wasn't supposed to touch.

Solution

Before changing anything, I read through the Model, View, and Controller files for every feature I was going to modify. Traced how a request moved from the route through the controller to the view and back. Only started making changes once I had a clear picture of each flow.

Result

Got the changes done without breaking unrelated features. The upfront reading took longer but the actual edits were fast and clean once I understood what I was looking at.

Problem

The content feed used numbered page buttons. The client found it clunky and wanted content to load continuously as the user scrolled rather than jumping between fixed pages.

Solution

Replaced the pagination with cursor-based loading using Firestore's startAfter() query method. Each batch stores the last document as a cursor. The next fetch passes that cursor to Firestore to load the next set. No page numbers, no offset arithmetic.

Result

The feed loads the next batch from where it left off. The experience feels continuous and removes the need for any page state tracking.