Tula · JournalCase study · 2026
Building a home for Nepalis, wherever they live.
Hamro Sangam is a community platform for Nepali people living abroad: jobs, housing, events, travel companions, guides and anonymous support in one trusted place. I designed it, built the API and both apps, and run it in production. This is how it works, and why I built it the way I did.
01 — Home
The home screen is built around the small things that make living abroad feel connected: today's Nepal date and time, the Bikram Sambat calendar with the next festival counting down, and the dollar-to-rupee rate. Below that, one tap reaches every hub: jobs, housing, events, travel, City Sangams, community, guides and Safe Space.
02 — Help Feed
A community feed that is simply newest-first buries the post someone needs answered tonight. The Help Feed balances urgency, safety, freshness, location and what you have already seen, so the useful posts surface and the same ones do not keep repeating. Switch between Local, Country and Global, or filter to urgent requests and offers of help.
03 — Explore
Explore groups settlement and daily life (housing, jobs, transit) with cultural life: a Nepali calendar, City Sangams for local Nepali circles across the USA and Australia, practical guides, and community questions. It is searchable and organised by what you are trying to do, not by how the code is structured.
04 — Travel Together
Long flights home are easier with company. A travel post renders as a boarding pass with the route, times, carrier and stops, plus a clear journey timeline with transit details. If your route lines up, you request a companion in one tap, with safer coordination inside the community.
Under the hood
Two apps, one shared contract.
Decisions that mattered
One deployable keeps operations simple for a small team, but the modules have hard boundaries: they talk through service interfaces, never each other's repositories. Any module can be pulled out later without changing the public API.
The web app uses a HttpOnly refresh cookie. The mobile app sends a bearer token and stores a rotating refresh token in the Keychain or Keystore. Native Apple and Google sign-in send identity tokens to the API, and no token is ever placed in a deep-link URL.
Chronological order fails a community built on asking for help. The Help Feed scores urgency, safety, freshness, location and what you have already seen, so a relevant post is not buried by noise.
Safe Space allows anonymous replies. New City Sangams and Career Circles are reviewed by a moderator before they go live, posts pass an objectionable-content filter, and anything can be reported or removed.
Latest release · 1.1.0
Connect. Share. Grow together.
Visit hamrosangam.com Available on the App Store and Google Play.1 like · October 2, 2026 at 12:00 AM
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