So, I’m 27 and currently in my final year CS; I got into college a bit late, but better late than never.

I built Phenrix, an ephemeral password and sensitive information sharing platform. It’s designed with a clean separation between the backend (the main API) and the background services: workers, queues, brokers, etc. Side note: I am a sucker for system architecture.

But I noticed that the background setup itself was eating into my costs. Since I have literally zero users , I decided to clone my backend and offload background tasks to the clone (asgi-django). The main backend now sends task requests to its “twin,” which handles all the background jobs asynchronously, kind of like a DIY task queue setup.

At first, I was using HashiCorp Vault to store my encryption keys, until they tried to charge me over $600/month so I switched to a self-hosted vault instead. I haven’t hooked it up to the backend yet (hence the errors you'd see in the screenshot), but that’s next on my list.

I shut the project down temporarily since it doesn’t have active users yet, but I’ll be spinning it back up soon because I’m planning to use it as my final project in one of my courses.

See a screenshot of the Architecture Diagram