Close
The project
Around half of young adults in the Netherlands feel lonely at times, Close aims to reduce this by providing a platform where young adults can arrange to meet up with other users of the app. This is done by showing nearby events and users and matching users on their interests.
Our role for this project was to improve the existing application by adding miscellaneous features like additional login options, improving the onboarding flow and adding more advanced matching logic. We also created a dashboard where the clients could see key analytics about the performance and usage of the app like the amount of meetups, what interests were the most popular and what type of device was most used.
How are we supposed to measure the success of this project?
The customer
Our clients are Alexander Akbik and Mathias Fallak, they created Close as a side-project with the goal of reducing the increased amount of loneliness they were witnessing after the pandemic. We had an online meeting every 2 weeks to show what progress was made and discuss what changes should be made in the next sprint, they were always very helpful and willing to give constructive feedback. Because of the nature of the project we also had an informal meet-up to get to know each other better, so in that sense this project was already a success.
The team
Matthé had the role of Scrum Master organizing the meeting and handling the scrum process. Maurice was the Product Owner translating the requested features into issues with user stories that could be picked up. However both these team members also helped with the development of the app. The rest of the team mainly focused on development. To divide the work we divided up the issues created in the Github Kanban board. When collaboration was required to fix an issue we mainly used video calls, however we did sometimes come together to brainstorm. The biggest challenge we overcame was an issue with the database of the existing app which forced us to focus on that issue as other added features could not be tested. As a team we are most proud of the impact we could have in reducing the large and growing issue of loneliness in our country.
I changed nothing and now it is broken.
The technologies
The frontend is a basic Vue.js web app written in TypeScript, the backend is a Node.js application written in Typescript. We use Prisma for database migrations, Redis for caching and Docker for building production images