The story of Words Of Iron

Introduction

On October 7, Hamas launched a devastating attack in Israel, profoundly impacting our nation. From the very first day of the war, many Israelis, who do not actively serve in the reserves or hold official positions, established civilian initiatives to support Israel in every conceivable way. These initiatives gave rise to dozens of volunteer-based organizations aimed at providing equipment, enhancing security, securing funding, and bolstering Israel’s presence on social media.

Words Of Iron

During the initial days of the war, my colleagues and I began searching for volunteering projects where we could contribute and implement our ideas. As part of a larger collaborative effort, we came across “Words Of Iron.”

We quickly realized that wars today aren’t only fought on the battlefield. They are also fought on social media — a fight on the narrative.

wordsofiron.com is an application that empowers anyone to amplify Israel’s voice on social media with a single click. But how does it work? You simply visit wordsofiron.com, choose your preferred social media platforms, and then either promote posts that support Israel, by increasing their engagement, or report anti-Israel posts to help remove them from the internet.

Our POC

At the outset, we had numerous front-end developers but lacked funding. Therefore, we decided to set up the following proof of concept (POC) framework:

• GitHub for version control and collaboration.
• Monday.com for task management and target generation.
• Vercel to build, deploy, and host the web application.

The initial architecture was straightforward. We integrated various sources of target generators that populated positive and negative posts into a database via Monday.com. On Vercel, we ran a cloud environment hosting three components:

1. Webhook updates responsible for fetching new posts from Monday.com and pushing them to SupaBase.
2. A Next.js back-end application that exposes an API endpoint and provides the most recent and relevant posts to the FE.
3. A Next.js front-end application that displayed the most recent posts to users, allowing them to react to positive posts through sharing, liking, or reporting negative ones.

Scaling the POC

At this point, we had more volunteers, including back-end developers. However, we realized that the existing architecture was not yet production-ready. To ensure we could support tens of thousands of active users per day and provide the best possible user experience, we needed to restructure the application. We divided the logic into two services:

1. A back-end application that publishes an API endpoint, and provides most relevant targets to the FE app.
2. Webhook updates from monday.com tables to the SupaBase DB in our production environment.
3. A front-end application that provides the website.

Additionally, we introduced CDN caching to enhance the user experience and reduce the load on the back end.

From POC to Production-Ready

As we continued to grow, we expanded our support to include more apps (e.g., X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok).

While we stand on 10K of active users per day, we are asked to 100X our capacity.

With credits from our Azure subscription (thanks to Microsoft), we were ready to migrate to a new architecture. This new setup was impressive and included:

1. CosmosDB, a fully managed NoSQL database ideal for storing targets (both positive and negative posts).
2. Azure Cloud Functions to collect targets from Monday.com databases and populate CosmosDB.
3. A Next.js front-end application running on Azure App Service.
4. API management to safeguard our data and resources while facilitating our growth.
5. Azure CDN for scaling and improving performance and reducing our cloud costs, as our data was primarily static.

To Summarize

In a remarkably short time, with a small team of volunteers, we constructed a scalable, production-grade, and influential cloud application that made a significant impact, strengthening our nation’s presence and voice on social media. While we devoted substantial effort to other aspects like building an outstanding user experience, gathering and generating targets, and managing the entire operation, those topics are better suited for future articles.

Next Steps

Our roadmap is rich and promising. In addition to expanding support for more applications, enhancing scalability, improving performance, and boosting user engagement, we plan to enrich our comment text repository by leveraging the language model capabilities provided by Azure OpenAI private deployments.

Join Our Team!

Are you a software developer seeking an exciting challenge? Join us as a volunteer! At “Words Of Iron,” we’re making a real impact and having a blast doing it. Be part of our mission to strengthen Israel’s voice on social media. Whether you’re experienced or just starting your career, we welcome you to join the fun. Contact us at itamar@wordsofiron.com to get involved. Let’s make a difference together!

Many thanks to the incredible team:

Doron Ben-Elazar (Back-End Architect)

Igor Shegolev (Frontend & UX Architect)

Aviad Teresh (Product Manager)

Or Sharon (Azure Architect)

Sagi Carmel (FS developer)

Shir Rajuan (FS developer)

Aviran Huga (FS developer)

Ilya Yakushev (WOI CTO)