New in Town.
I'm currently working on my fullstack app New in Town. A user can collect and save all new & neccessary places after moving to a new city. New doctors to see, new cafés, restaurants and bars you get recommendations for and want to go out to, new places for trips in & around the city, new haircutters, new spa & wellness spots, and so on and so forth. I developed the web app as my first MERN Stack project during my professional education as a Fullstack Web Developer at Code Academy Berlin. The idea came to me after I moved from Cologne to Berlin in 2023. Before and after the move, I collected all kinds of informations in different apps with little structure. That’s why I set out to build a web app that is well structured and easy to use, and which helps the user to arrive and settle better in a new habitat.
App impressions
Tech stack
- React
- React Context
- React Router
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- MongoDB
- mongoose
- Express
- Node.js
- HTML
- CSS
- Tailwind CSS
- Styled Components
- Authentication
- Authorization
- JSON Web Token
- bcrypt
Problems and thought process
Like most projects, I ran into a few bumps along the way. One particularly difficult area was understanding how to structure server-side code and the database with MongoDB. As for the CSS, I wanted to learn Tailwind along this project. In the end though, my brain was too busy learning backend technologies and because of the greater familiarity, I often ended up using Styled Components. Looking back, I would use either Tailwind or Styled Components to have a clear and well-structured CSS.
Lessons learned
I could spend all day describing the lessons that I learned while working on this project. It’s my first fullstack web application project and I'm still working on it. Developing the backend and frontend and implementing a whole bunch of backend technologies was definitely a lot to process and apply for the first time. I learned about middlewares, models, routes, controller functions, passport tokens, bcrypt, authentication and so on. I’d say the most important lesson was how backend and frontend work together and how the backend is structured in the MERN stack. I was very grateful to have supportive mentors around me that I could always ask for help. I really learned a lot during code reviews and pair programming sessions with them and it definitely helped me overcome some frustrating moments. I'm proud to have achieved so much and look forward to developing the app further.