YaluwoVerified social network for international students.
01
Where the idea came from
Yaluwo started from something I lived. I moved to the United States on my own in 2024, and the part that hit hardest was how quickly I lost the home country thread I could reach for. Even at Adelphi I turned out to be the only Sri Lankan international student in my cohort, and I could not find anyone close by who shared that background. I kept thinking how much easier the early months would have been if a platform had surfaced someone from home for me. Adjusting to a new environment is hard enough on its own, and it gets easier when the first person you meet already shares common ground with you before you have to build the trust from scratch. Yaluwo is the version of that platform I wish I had landed into.
02
How it is built
Next.js plus React Native across web and mobile, with Supabase as the unified backend. Each country runs as a logical instance behind row level security, so a Sri Lankan student and a Brazilian student share the same schema but never share the same rows. Supabase Realtime powers the messaging layer, and alumni and faculty sit on top as a verified mentor role that passes through a lightweight review before they can reach students.
03
What I am learning from it
Running realtime plus row level security at the scale of a student body forces you to get specific about data ownership. Every query has to answer who asked, who owns the row, and whether the join respects the country boundary. That discipline is already showing up in how I think about every other product I touch.