I Found My Best Friend

A tinder inspired web application, for matching prospective adoption seekers in the Boston region, with their future best friends!

App is live at https://ifoundmybff.herokuapp.com

How It's Made:

Utilized:

<ul> 
    <li>JavaScript</li>
    <li>Node</li>
    <li>Express</li>
    <li>EJS</li>
    <li>CSS(flexbox and grid)</li>
    <li>Mongoose</li>
    <li>Passport (auth)</li>
    <li>Petfinder API SDK</li>
</ul>

The current product utilizes M-V-C based design pattern.

Reflections and Description

Users are able to sign up for an account and search through a list of adoptable pets in the Boston region. At this time an actual matching feature would be hard to implement without cooperation from individual shelters. Thus users are able to save the details of the dogs they "swipe right" on.

Lessons Learned:

Through building this app, I was able to get comfortable with the basics of GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. As well as further familiarizing myself in using EJS.

Additionally, I was better able to vizualize and familiarize myself with how these requests are made, through the use of MVC.

I found that organizing files, introduced some fun new challenges in keeping track of the apps functionalities.

Using the SDK of a well documented API was a refreshing experience and being able to do all the authentication in the backend was amazing.

Optimizations

As someone with no background in art, styling could definitely use improvements.

Optimize CSS

Some of the code needs to refactored for better readabiility.

Fix some design breaking aspects.

Upcoming features:

• Allowing users to determine their original location
• Accessibilty features like, high contrast and zoom in options
• Convining the dogs to let me include cats in the searches

Errors and Bugs

If something behaves unexpectedly, it is likely a bug. Create an issue and report it here

Previews

---

Running the app Locally

Install

npm install

Things to add

• Create a .env file and add the following as key = value
  • PORT = 2121 (can be any port example: 3000)
  • DB_STRING = your database URI
  • CLOUD_NAME = your cloudinary cloud name
  • PET_KEY = your petfinder api key
  • PET_SECRET = your petfinder api secret (don't forget to add your .env to .gitIgnore to keep your secrets a secret)

Run

npm start