Introduction

I and my friend Usman Ahmad hereby introduce COBUILD, a mobile application built for developers to discover new interesting projects to work on with fellow developers. The MVP of the app is built for the Netlify x Hashnode Hackathon.

Here you can try to see the app:- https://cobuild.netlify.app/

Here is the repository link:- https://github.com/abdulsalamcodes/cobuild

Tools ⚒️

• React Native:-To develop the cross-platform mobile app for both ios and android.
• Firebase:- For storing data, images, and authentication.
• Typescript:- For appropriately typing of the Javascript.
• Netlify:- To deploy our application.

Motivation✨

Developers have been known to have lots of good but abandoned projects. Lol, I have a couple of them too. I thought if there could be ways to allow other developers who are sincerely interested in the project can team up and contribute to the project. Having other developers on one's project would also keep one accountable, disciplined, and more motivated to build and complete the project.

Features💻

• A user can log in or sign up on the app using email and password or Google authentication.
• A user can see a list of projects posted by other developers and can click on it to see more details about the project. The list can be viewed based on popularity, trending or recent.
• A user can add a new project for other developers to see.

Struggles and Challenges.

We both have to work daily and deliver at our full-time job plus still in college and have to balance that with school work, tests, and exams.

Also, for both of us, this is our first real project with React Native and Typescript. We have to learn on the job while building the app. The process was challenging but interesting. We have to watch tutorial videos on youtube and read the documentation.

I personally handled the navigation part. I struggled with understanding how that works and how to feel convenient implementing it. I had to relearn and unlearn to get a way around it. Also, typescript! It was nice working with the tool as it makes it easier to spot errors in codes easily. But then, typescript was not nice to me in ways it screams error in my codebase!. I had to revisit the documentation and tutorials.

On Ahmad's end, he handled the firebase setup with React Native. The process wasn't smooth as that would be his first experience with it also. At first, we started the project using expo, we got to eject it to make it work with the react-native firebase package.

Learnings📕

• Both of us learned teamwork and collaboration.
• Building a React Native app for the first time.
• Working with typescript for a project for the first time.

Future Roadmap🛣️

• User Authentication using Github
• Bookmarks
• Searching functionality
• In-App chatting.
• Push notification.

#Netlify #NetlifyHackathon