Dinner Mates

A website/app to find companionship for dinner

About

Dinner Mates is an online platform where you can find someone with similar interests to mate for dinner.

The idea behind this project was to treat the isolation & loneliness that some people feel when they have no friend or companion to join for the last meal of the day.

This project doesn’t promote any sort of dating! Just companionship for a great time, a healthy conversation, and great food at any place.

To make the app function, users have to create an account and fill in their basic details with some interests and hobbies.

Afterward, the algorithm of Dinner Mates will try to establish a connection by matching the hobbies & interests of registered users in its database.

Following that, it will send invites to a minimum of six people and successfully set up a dinner night for them.

Expertise Delivered

Frontend Backend

How did we overcome challenges?

Dinner mates is a real-time communication app. These sorts of projects require a solid database and smooth communicators to function optimally.

Besides, the client requested it to work on all browsers & platforms, including iOS & Android. But, that wasn’t a problem for us. The challenge obstructing our progress was that the iOS PWA we built wasn’t throwing ‘Add to home screen’ popups.

At that moment, our most experienced developers came ahead for help and assisted us in customizing our theme to provide custom popups separately for iOS users.

How did we operate?

As typically it has to be, our first step was to discuss the user journey & experience with the client. After that, we joined forces with the UI/UX designers to produce detailed project wireframes. Once the client approved the frames, we progressed towards technicalities.

Being an info-intensive project, we had to ensure the user could easily manage the data. Therefore, we embed top-grade hybrid technology React Native, Redux, and PWA with NodeJS & Express.

It took two of our ReactJS developers with PWA experience, one NodeJS developer, and a QA tester to form the development team.

After that, we created a core admin panel where the site admin could manage the whole site’s content, its users, and memberships to see the complete reporting analysis.

Key Features & Technical Bits of Project – ‘Dinner Mates’

Maintaining jitter-free communication & flagship performance at each platform, check out what makes Dinner Mates a special deal:-

  • 01

    Invitation Notifications via Firebase

    Firebase sends push notifications to each user about their dinner mates, timings, location & other necessary stuff.

  • 02

    Braintree & PayPal Payment Gateway Integration

    These full-stack payment platforms make monetary transactions easy & secure without any hiccup.

  • 03

    Node & Express for API Development

    Using NodeJS with ExpressJS, we create a scalable API proxy that handles massive requests simultaneously.

  • 04

    Agile Development Methodology

    We broke our project into manageable chunks and dealt with each, maintaining 100% transparency with our client.

  • 05

    Visual Studio Code

    Our developers are familiar with VS Studio Code IDE at the back of their hands. It allows them to write clean, stable & bug-free code.

  • 06

    Google Map Integration

    Google Maps API will allow in geotagging the dinner location. Following that, users can easily navigate to their meetup point.

Tools and Technologies Used

We used a number of latest and state-of-the-art tools and technologies to complete this project. Few of these technologies are mentioned below:

  • React.js

  • API Inteegration

  • Node.js

  • Authentication

  • MySQL database

  • Payment Gateway