DEVELOPMENT & IMPLEMENTATION

With starter screens from an external designer, we worked closely with the founders to flesh out the UI design and craft the UX, prior to going into development.

A fun challenge was the payment model. Originally we integrated Stripe only to find that Stripe cancelled the client’s account without explanation so we quickly switched to Balanced, which was very soon after acquired by Stripe, so we switched back to Stripe.

Other things we learned included making User Creation much more lightweight (e-mail address and password/FB auth token) and then having a separate resource for all of the other user metadata (name, location, etc) because that info may be entered in bit by bit by the user. We also broke it out into its own endpoint (like /signup) because User Creation is a heavy-duty operation with significant side-effects.

All swipes/votes - both yay and nay - were tracked as endpoints that supported POST rather than REST because each vote would trigger a series of downstream actions, and there were no take-backsies or modifications.

Also in anticipating many-to-one or many-to-many relationships in the future, we baked them into the data model/API even though the UI exposed it as a one-to-one relationship.