SkillSwap

SkillSwap is a full-stack marketplace where people trade skills instead of money, built on a Laravel 13 API with a Next.js 16 client and real-time messaging over Laravel Reverb WebSockets. The platform covers the complete lifecycle of a skill exchange: browsing and searching teachers by skill, sending a skill request with a proposed time, and moving that request through a six-state state machine, with seven server-side guards enforcing valid transitions and a scheduled job auto-expiring stale requests.

Once a request is accepted, participants get real-time one-to-one chat with image and file attachments via Cloudinary, cursor-paginated history with infinite scroll, read/unread tracking, and message deduplication across the HTTP POST and WebSocket echo paths. Completed exchanges feed into a review and reputation system: one review per participant per request, cached average ratings in Redis, and admin moderation for hidden reviews, with an audit log on every state change.

A real-time notification system covers every major event with a bell, an unread badge, per-type navigation targets, mark-all-read (deliberately excluding message_received), soft-delete dismiss, and server-side deduplication across three listeners. The admin portal adds a dashboard with six real-time metric cards, user suspension, and review moderation, all behind Sanctum authentication and role middleware.

The codebase enforces a strict three-layer architecture end-to-end: controllers route only, services own all business logic, and repositories handle all Eloquent queries, with no layer bleeding, backed by 105 automated tests and 241 assertions running CI-green via GitHub Actions. Visually, the platform uses a custom design system: a copper, verdigris, sage, and ink palette, Fraunces display serif paired with Inter body text and JetBrains Mono for numeric records, semantic Tailwind CSS v4 tokens, and a responsive mobile-first layout with a hamburger sidebar.

The whole stack runs locally via Docker Compose across eight services (PostgreSQL 15, Redis 7, Mailhog, the Laravel server, the Reverb WebSocket server, the Next.js client, a queue worker, and a scheduler) with no local dependencies required.