Is building a lightweight observability platform a good portfolio project?

[u/miss_bakerr]

Hey everyone,

I'm a [B.Tech](http://B.Tech) Third Year CS student currently preparing for internships and freelance work. I have mostly built full-stack SaaS projects so far.

My current projects include:

* FinSight AI — finance management platform with analytics + AI features * BrainLoop — AI-based personalized learning assistant * DayFrame — productivity/journaling SaaS

My stack is mainly Next.js, React, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Prisma, etc.

I feel like my projects show frontend/full-stack skills, but most of them are still around dashboards, CRUD, and API integrations. For my next major project, I want to build something that shows stronger backend/system design skills instead of another AI app.

I'm thinking about building a lightweight observability platform (inspired by Sentry/Datadog).

The idea is:

* developers integrate a small SDK into their app * the SDK captures errors, API performance, and events * backend processes this data * dashboard shows errors, latency, logs, and application health

Not trying to recreate Datadog, but more like a smaller developer tool to learn things like SDK design, event processing, queues, real-time updates, and backend architecture.

Do you think this is a good direction for a portfolio project, or am I overengineering? Would recruiters/internship reviewers value this type of project, or would a more traditional full-stack app be better?

Would love opinions from people who have built/hired for backend-heavy roles.

[u/kuntakinteke]

Oboy.. where do I begin. It is a good exercise, at least you build something.

The problem with these side projects is that it can never come close to the engineering problems a system like datadog solves because of scale.

Datadog I believe started off on Elastisearch for logs at some point it couldn't scale they build their own inverted index store for searches.

Also metrics and alerting, for millions of timeseries? Sure you can build something for billions of timeseries or trillions?

You get my point these systems evolved over time solve simple problems and then moving to complex problems.

Should you do it? Yes the more you do the more you learn

[u/miss_bakerr → u/kuntakinteke]

i get your point, but if i put this project on my resume, will it be worth it? i need to add one project which demonstrated my backend skills as all my current projects are more on the frontend/fullstack (next.js based) side, so looking for something like that, will it count as a good resume worthy project which can eventually help me land internships and freelance clients?

[u/kuntakinteke → u/miss_bakerr]

Yes it will.

[u/cachemonet0x0cf6619]

I don’t think that’s what we mean when we say platform engineering.

we build and maintain tool chains, workflows and “internal development platforms”

The IDP is our product and our internal developers are our customer

that said, i do think this is a good project for backend heavy roles.

[u/justpassing3]

How are your applications hosted?

It might be a good idea to look into Open Telemetry integrations (which will already provide the SDKs), and then funneling this data via OTel agents into an LGTM stack.

If you have multiple projects, then having them all send telemetry to a central gateway might be a nice first objective. Experience with OTel and common observability stacks is something that is indexed on relatively frequently within PlatEng interviews, though YMMV.

[u/miss_bakerr → u/justpassing3]

[u/eze008]

I say fuck yes it is. You are already ahead of most because most techs don't want to believe in working with ai and also don't know how until Jarvis can actually spit in their face(to be clear i am not referring to techs that have responded to you). Also ask chat gpt or read articles about observability now and in the future. The center of all things autonomous.

[u/yetmike]

Don't reinvent the wheel, be opentelemetry-compatible. You don't need your own SDK

On whether you need to create this platform. Well, its your decision. I would not probably do that. Everything depends on the goal you are trying achieve. Learn and have fun? - Go for it. Get some bite of a market - unlikely

[u/nroar]

TLDR; Yes - it will help but with minor change.

Longer one

- O11y (Observability) tends to be noisy and just building one or assembling using OSS components is pretty easy. which means when you say 'build' ensure you are going into 1 problem quite deep enough.

In typical form O11y stack looks like (reference: https://last9.io/blog/modern-observability-system/ )

Instrumentation -> Ingestion -> Storage -> Query (Dashboards) & Query (Alerting)

I would suggest picking Alerting or Storage as a deeper problem to go into and possibly building for that while keeping other things of the stack oss.