I have been a part of numerous web projects, and after these many applications using multiple languages and frameworks, when my friend Kunal suggested that we should develop an Android application that would make use of a backend and stuff like that, I couldn’t help but desperately show my excitement. I told my friends, family and even seniors about the thing I am working on. After all, it was my first time going full stack mobile.
For clarifying things, I am still doing the backend. It is my little team that has gone full stack. On mobile. The application, called the moodShare will enable a user to do few simple tasks like registering, logging in, adding friends, sharing statuses, reading statuses and stuff like that. Each task is made possible with a simple API that is made without much thought to future scaling. I know, that is really bad from my side. But then, I was too desperate to get an application up and running that I neglected a lot of issues that arose when we were developing.
The application’s backend was Mongo, Express and Node. We deployed it to Modulus.io but then this happened and we had to shift it to Heroku.
And this was when we had around 4 live users. The code quality was poor, very poor. Trust me when I say it. 4 users were hitting the database around 7 times a second.
Then there were many other issues as well. For example, if you added a friend who had 400 status updates in his or her name before you added, your phone would notify you, well, 400 times. Literally. That was awful. Push notification was implemented in a way you write an infinite for loop to check if something has changed.
But hey, this was our first time. We did enjoy each and every second of the development (around 4 days), the bugs just as much. We did learn a lot from it. Before this project, messaging queue was just a name, Google Cloud Messaging was just another service that I knew nothing about, three or four HTTP status codes that I knew. The satisfaction of knowing more about these was worth it all. Lastly, we did not abandon the project. Our alpha version was pretty stiff and unusable. Hopefully, with better APIs, better hosting and material design on the frontend, we plan to rock with the beta version. Stay tuned.
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