UX Workshop, Product Design, Front-End Development, Back-End Development & System Architecture

Seek Discomfort, the American brand founded by the creators of the Yes Theory YouTube channel, came to us with a bold proposition: build a chat platform where people from anywhere in the world could be connected, live, with strangers, for 1-on-1 or group conversations.The premise was simple on the surface and technically brutal underneath: click one button, and within seconds, be in conversation with someone on the other side of the planet.

The real challenge wasn't building a chat.It was building a chat capable of handling a massive volume of simultaneous requests, where every user entering the queue had to be paired with another in a matter of seconds, respecting matching rules (gender, availability, online status), without lag, without leaving anyone waiting indefinitely, and without compromising the experience of anyone already in conversation.

We designed an event-driven architecture capable of absorbing peaks of simultaneous connections and processing the matching logic asynchronously, keeping the user experience fluid even under high concurrency. The heart of the system is an event queue that receives every user who clicks "Connect me with a stranger", processes the connection rules, queries the database to apply matching criteria, and fires off the conversation via TalkJS as soon as a compatible pair is found. If the matched user drops off before the connection completes, the system returns the waiting user to the queue automatically, without friction.

Back-end — Node.js
Front-end — React
Database — MySQL
Chat engine — TalkJS
Architecture — Event-driven, with asynchronous matching queue