Chautari started as a simple idea — a lightweight social space — and grew into both a web app and an Android app sharing the same backend. The stack decision mattered more than usual because two different frontends needed to talk to the same API cleanly.
React gave the web app a component model that mapped naturally onto the mobile UI later, which made reasoning about shared product logic much easier. Node.js and Express kept the API layer in JavaScript end-to-end, so I wasn't context-switching languages between frontend and backend. MongoDB fit because the data — posts, comments, reactions — doesn't need rigid relational structure, and it scales horizontally without much ceremony.
The real lesson: pick a stack that matches how your data actually behaves, not the stack that's trending. A social feed is document-shaped. A financial ledger is not. Treat them differently.