Trying to make friends in a city or new place can be difficult. We're here to fix that. Our app is called Just Meet. We've designed it to facilitate meeting up for social events and meeting like minded people in your area. The design is simple and straightforward, making it easy to meet new people and discover your new favorite hobby. You can see events in your area with an interactive map, join events/groups that align with your interests, post new events that you want others to join and make a user profile to link all your attended and hosted events. We were inspired by other apps like too good to go (where you can see different restaurants offering surplus food around you on a map view) and partner/friend-finding apps that are more focused on making new connections
It is for people new to an area, people looking for activities to do and people looking to make new friends.

We used MongoDB, Mongoose, Express, Node.JS, Jest, AWS, EC2 Instance, React Native, Expo Go, Google Maps API, Axios.

(The) MERN techstack - MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.
We used this due to its popularity in the industry, knowing that developing a solid foundation in these technologies would serve us well in future endeavours. We know that many startups and new projects are using this tech stack, therefore so are we!

The database:
Having already had some exposure to relational databases, we decided to make a U-turn and play around with NoSQL - step in MongoDB! For better or for worse, MongoDB offers more flexibility than traditional SQL databases such as PostgreSQL. A little too flexible in fact, and so we decided to bring in the Mongoose JS library to try and instill some structure to our dataset.

Building the back-end:
Our back-end was built using Node.js, uses the robust testing suite of Jest, and employs an Express.js server to handle http requests. With some difficulty, we (meaning George), eventually managed to host our API on AWS using an EC2 instance, chosen for its scalability, flexibility, and control.

The Front-end:
Our front-end was built using the React Native framework, and bundled with Expo for ease of access. Axios allows us to interact with our API, as well as the Google Maps API, and handles parsing for some quality of life improvements during development. Thankfully, React Native is supported by a wealth of UI component libraries, and we deployed a variety of these components to improve the experience for our end-user.