Espressions

10 months ago

This was a hobby project where I wanted to refresh my app-building skills by writing a brand new API, and this time I wanted to do it really properly and professionally, which I did. The idea was to build something like Untappd, but instead of beer you use it to check in coffees, made for real coffee fanatics.

Building it was genuinely fun. I made the app with Expo, a framework I had never used before. I normally reach for React Native, and Expo turned out to be a really good replacement for it.

It became a full social media app with its own backend: users have profiles, post coffee check-ins, and friends can react to and like each other's posts. I also built an algorithm for the feed, so you see a mix of your friends' check-ins and posts from public profiles.

One of the bigger challenges was the monorepo. This was the first time I really set one up, sharing types and utilities across the different applications, so it pushed me to think carefully about how to structure everything. On top of the app and its API, I also built a separate frontend to promote it.

In the end I did not publish it to the Play Store or App Store. Coffee is not really my passion, I do not even drink coffee, haha, and getting an app all the way into the stores takes a lot of time, so I skipped that part for this one. I did take my drinking games app all the way into the Play Store, and you can read about that here.