Date-a-baes: A Dating App For Hackers

I’m in San Francisco this summer at a twelve-week coding boot camp called Horizons School of Technology. Horizons hosted a hackathon two weeks ago where my team and I built a dating app for hackers called date-a-baes. Check out their post about it here!
I’d never been in a hackathon before so I knew little about the intensity of a 24 hour coding session. At the start of the day, the first challenge we faced was coming up with this idea. We were looking for something that would be interesting and educational while still being fun. Once we had an idea, we were faced with the challenge of execution. We mapped out the user interface and scale of our app, and decided two of us would work on technical development while our third partner designed the UI. My assignment was to develop the technical functionality from the React Redux front-end to the back-end database connections. Prior to the hackathon, we had a one-day introduction to mobile development using React Native and I became obsessed and spent the rest of the week teaching myself how to create mobile apps. If you’re looking for an awesome React Native tutorial, I highly recommend Stephen Grider’s Advanced React and Redux course.
Three days into my mobile app education, however, even with a solid background in web development, a full-scale dating app was definitely a challenge. The two biggest hurdles were choosing and implementing a database to facilitate a live chat feature, and creating swiping cards so users could browse for potential matches. Before touching code, I researched web sockets and how to link action listeners to a realtime database. We ended up using Firebase, which runs in the cloud and includes identity management, realtime data views and a document database, everything we needed to build our app. This research definitely paid off and we didn’t run into nearly as many debugging issues down the line as many other groups. Because the swiping cards are a very popular feature on apps such as Tinder and Bumble, I suspected there would be boilerplates that would save some serious coding time. After scanning projects on GitHub to see what dependencies people were using, I was able to easily piece together my own implementation of the swiping cards with almost no issues. You can play around with an example here! I learned a lot about the value of understanding and utilizing available resources to build a project in the best and most efficient way. Our project overall was focused on personal development and I definitely came away with a lot of new knowledge and understanding of mobile applications. Last week that we learned we won the prize for best design! Thanks to an awesome team I had a great first hackathon experience. And we haven’t stopped working so definitely keep your eye out for the deployment of our app!
