No, not the fruit. But if you like fruits and want to connect with other fruit enthusiasts, that is the platform Passionfruit aims to be. With the intention of bringing people closer to their interests, be it cooking, sports, hiking, reading, photography, or simply to find friends or partners, our client, Vector Space Co. Ltd., wished to create a platform where users could do that and more by interacting with other like-minded people.
The story began when Passionfruit wanted to build this perfect application that allowed users to mingle with other like-minded users. Noticing the lack of meaningful social connections in a world where social networking platforms are dime-a-dozen, Passionfruit wished to create small communities where only the people with same interests would engage.
Passionfruit handed our resource an app that only enabled users to log in. So, from the first step, it was up to Abishek to add every single feature and create the app just like the clients wanted.
The process began by allowing users to create multiple profiles - one for each of their interests so they could keep all their lounges and interactions separate.
But that was just the beginning – there were 24 new features that he had to build from scratch. Developed with the constant guidance and feedback from the clients, the new features enabled three main functionalities:
Putting the “social” in this social networking app, Abishek created an algorithm that allowed users to engage with others. As a result, users could now like, share, and comment on other posts, as well as follow/ unfollow, block/unblock, and chat with other users.
With the help of Elastic Search and Algolia, users could now look up other users or specific clubs/groups. Furthermore, keyword optimization facilitated users to explore groups by searching their interests.
To prevent any delay and to enhance user experience, Abishek incorporate an image/video compression functionality. Supported by a custom-created asynchronous workflow, this functionality enabled media files to be uploaded to the server in real-time without any delays.
Just like how our client wishes to get people in touch with like-minded people, we wanted to do the same for them. In the journey to find the most suitable resource, Passionfruit chose Abishek to be their partner for the journey, and it turned out to be a match made in heaven!
As a backend developer with almost 10 years’ experience, Abishek’s proficiency in PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL, NodeJs, and ExpressJs helped him understand the intricacies of the app easily.
As a backend developer, Abishek’s relied on NestJS and TypeORM to make sure that the server side of the application was in prime condition.
NestJS allowed our expert resource to build a reliable and scalable server-side application using NodeJS. Known to be more efficient and trustworthy for large-scale applications and apps that anticipate hosting a monumental user and data base, using this framework turned out to be the best decision.
TypeORM’s reputation as an easy-to-use ORM, especially for apps that need to connect to databases, made it easy for Abishek and Passionfruit to use this for the project as well. The result? A scalable application that could be developed at a superfast speed that also provides a customized user experience.
Challenges were bound to pop up, but they were nothing our resource could not handle.
Abishek was unfamiliar with both NestJS and TypeORM. While this could have been a major hindrance, especially considering the app was entirely built on these two, our resource put his brain to work and quickly learned all that was there in record speed!
Considering that facilitating search for new interests and like-minded people forms the crux of the app, unfamiliarity with Algolia and Elastic Search presented great problems initially. But just like with NestJS and TypeORM, Abishek soon grasped the nitty-gritties of both search engine frameworks.
A fully functioning social networking app that
Basically everything that the client set out to do when
they sought us out!
Donghoon Lee
CEO
