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2025 - Satyam Jha

About me​

  • I’m Satyam Jha, a pre-final year student at IIT (BHU) Varanasi, and an open-source contributor passionate about mobile app development and modern technologies.
    My expertise lies in Flutter, Dart, GraphQL, and state management using BloC, Provider, Riverpod & GetX.

  • I’ve been contributing to The Palisadoes Foundation since late 2024, focusing on improving the Talawa mobile app — a community engagement platform.

  • I’m passionate about building scalable, real-time systems and love solving architectural challenges that improve stability and user experience.

Project overview​

Project Title: Making the Mobile App Robust and Restoring Original Features

This project focused on reviving and modernizing core features of the Talawa mobile app, especially those that became non-functional after the backend migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL.
The primary goals were:

  • Restoring the chat system (both direct and group chats) with full real-time functionality.
  • Restoring the donation feature (handled inherently within plugin integration).
  • Enhancing app robustness, performance, and code maintainability through model updates, GraphQL migration, and consistent architecture alignment.

Project recap​

Over the course of the internship, I:

  • Designed and implemented a real-time chat system with both direct and group messaging.
  • Added support for chat creation, messaging, pagination, and real-time GraphQL subscriptions.
  • Migrated old MongoDB-style queries and models to PostgreSQL GraphQL schema.
  • Refactored the service, model, and view layers to match the new backend.
  • Assisted in testing and debugging donation-related functionality integrated through the Talawa Plugin project (by Jai).
  • Coordinated closely with the backend team to align data structure and feature parity between Talawa Mobile and Talawa API.
  • Contributed major PRs of around 15,000–20,000 lines each, covering complete feature modules.

The chat system implementation was divided into multiple phases — direct messaging and group chats — both completed ahead of schedule. The system now supports real-time WebSocket communication, group administration, member management, and message pagination.
Throughout the process, I focused on maintaining the existing MVVM structure of Talawa, ensuring scalability and avoiding unnecessary architectural changes.

Completed work​

Talawa Mobile​

  • #2843: feat — Migrate chat system to PostgreSQL GraphQL schema (Chat Feature – Phase 1).
  • #2859: feat — Complete direct chat system with real-time messaging and enhanced UI (Phases 2–4).
  • #2879: feat — Complete group chat system with real-time messaging and role-based member management.
  • #2977: fix — Update chat functionality for new API structure with ChatMember support.

Talawa API​

  • #3511: feat — Add chatsByUser query to retrieve all chats of a specific user.
  • #3525: feat — Enable chat CRUD for organization members and improve timestamp access.

Current state​

All core deliverables have been completed:

  • Direct and Group Chats are fully functional, tested, and stable.
  • Real-time messaging works across organizations with efficient pagination and caching.
  • Role-based member management (admins, members) is integrated seamlessly.
  • Donation feature was inherently covered under the plugin project, tested successfully with Jai.

What remains​

  • Advanced chat functionalities like:
    • Message deletion
    • Edit chat messages
    • Sending attachments (images, documents)
  • Offline message queue support (for retrying unsent messages) — a complex feature that requires additional architectural setup.

All other deliverables are completed successfully and merged upstream.

Challenges and lessons learned​

The chat system was built using Flutter within the existing MVVM architecture, ensuring clean separation between logic and UI. It utilised:

  • GraphQL for backend integration with the new PostgreSQL schema.
  • WebSocket subscriptions for real-time updates.
  • Hive for local caching and partial offline functionality.
  • Stream-based services to maintain live chat updates efficiently.

Key challenges faced:

  • Implementing GraphQL subscriptions with robust reconnection handling.
  • Managing WebSocket–HTTP synchronization and TLS handshake issues.
  • Designing a scalable group chat system with admin-based permissions.
  • Maintaining UI responsiveness with large chat lists and paginated messages.

These required deep debugging and close collaboration with the backend team, which strengthened my understanding of real-time systems, data flow synchronisation, and Flutter–GraphQL integration.

Key lessons learned:

  • Strong understanding of GraphQL schema design, query optimization, and subscription handling.
  • Improved ability to debug cross-platform real-time systems and complex API integrations.
  • Learned best practices in collaborative open-source development, including large PR management, review iteration, and CI testing.
  • Understood the value of clean code, architectural consistency, and long-term maintainability in open-source projects.

Conclusion​

This internship has been a rewarding experience that strengthened my technical, collaborative, and problem-solving skills.
I had the opportunity to work on one of the most complex and impactful features of the Talawa app — the real-time chat system — and see it come to life from design to deployment.

I’m thankful to Mr. Peter Harrison, Mr. Md. Noman Khan, and the Palisadoes Foundation team for their continuous mentorship and feedback throughout the program.
I look forward to continuing my contributions and supporting future Talawa development efforts.