Invite Club Full-stack Development

Invite Club Hires Lengin Experts After an Unsuccessful Remote Development Experience

About Invite Club

Invite Club is a web-based app that revolutionizes the process of sending and receiving invitations. It is designed for a community of adventurous travelers who are willing to invest in their trips.

The application boasts a sleek UX/UI design and offers all the essential features needed for organizing and participating in various prestigious events:

Events catalog
Invitations management
Applicants list
Notifications
Built-in messenger
User profiles

Built using Node.js and React, Invite Club ensures high performance and security. Additionally, it offers seamless scalability, making it ideal for MVP development stages.

Why Invite Club Hired Lengin Developers

Before our full-stack developer joined the project, it had undergone over a year of development. The client had attempted collaboration with several other development providers, all of whom had not demonstrated sufficient quality and dedication. The primary issue revolved around subpar engineering quality, characterized by inadequate decision-making and execution, mainly on the front end.

The application featured an acceptable back end built with Node.js. However, the React front end was disorganized, utilizing a mixture of old and new approaches, including both functional and class components. This resulted in performance issues and posed challenges for future maintenance.

Following comprehensive research and consultations, Invite Club decided to entrust the entire development process to Lengin developers for the following reasons:

Invite Club had experienced unsuccessful collaborations with other development companies.
They required a high level of expertise to address existing problems.
The need for a self-driven full-stack engineer who could work autonomously was paramount.
They sought a long-term partnership to avoid the need for constant developer switches.

What Technologies Did We Use?

Express.js

React

Node.js

Front-end:

React: A powerful library for crafting dynamic and interactive user interfaces, enabling seamless front-end development.
React Router: Facilitates client-side routing in React applications, ensuring smooth navigation and URL management.
Redux: Empowers efficient state management, allowing data sharing across React components for a synchronized user experience.
Redux Toolkit Query: Simplifies data fetching and state management, enhancing application performance and scalability.
Material UI: A comprehensive UI framework, offering aesthetically pleasing, responsive components for polished web designs.
React-google-autocomplete: Enhances location input functionality by integrating Google Places Autocomplete for precise user selections.

Back-end:

Node.js: A versatile runtime environment, powering server-side JavaScript for scalable and efficient back-end development.
Express.js: A minimalistic web application framework for Node.js, streamlining server creation and routing.
Mongoose: An Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB, simplifying data interactions and schema management.
Swagger: Enables effortless API documentation and testing, ensuring clear and well-documented back-end endpoints.

MongoDB: A NoSQL database solution, offering flexibility and scalability for efficient data storage and retrieval in diverse applications.

Testing the App: Over 1000 Errors

As mentioned previously, Invite Club reached out to Lengin due to a negative experience and unsatisfactory results obtained from hiring developers from less reputable vendors. They contacted Lengin because their project required extensive expertise in JavaScript, specifically Node.js and React, to address existing issues, as well as for ongoing development and maintenance.

Upon our engagement with Invite Club, the initial step involved conducting comprehensive testing of their application. The application exhibited numerous alerts, with Google Search Console alone reporting over 1000 alerts.

Concept of UX/UI Design And Functionality

Since Invite Club is an application that is specifically focused on certain tasks, its functionality and design are minimalist, aiming to address questions related to the organization and participation in various events to the maximum extent.

When we joined the project, the application had a concept of dividing users into participants and event organizers, each with different functionalities. However, after some time, our client decided to merge these roles, making some modifications and combining functionalities, as it simplifies the maintenance and scaling of the application.

Reengineering Into a New Functional Component Approach

In our work on the Invite Club app project, we encountered a mix of old-class and new-functional component approaches in React. This led to challenges in code complexity, maintainability, and performance. To overcome these issues, we migrated the project entirely to the modern functional component approach using React Hooks. This transition enhanced code readability, simplified testing, and brought the project in line with the latest React practices, ensuring its long-term viability and scalability.

We initially encountered on the project a combination of both old and new versions of the Material-UI library. This presented challenges in terms of consistency, maintenance, and compatibility. To resolve these issues, we made the decision to migrate the project exclusively to the latest version of Material-UI.

Event Drafts

While we refined and enhanced much of the existing functionality, implementing various fixes, primarily on the front end, we also developed new features. One of them was the development of the back end and front end for event drafts, which synchronized with the payment system, profile database, shared calendars, and other data to facilitate clear event organization and participation.

Involving DevOps to Solve SSL Certificate Issues

We ran into some problems with our SSL certificate. To beef up our security efforts, we brought in a skilled DevOps specialist to give us a hand with our SSL/TLS certificates.

One tricky issue we encountered was related to the certificate chain. It turns out that issues with intermediate certificates, like them being missing or not configured correctly, can be a real headache. These problems can lead to trust issues, where the certificate isn’t recognized as valid by our clients.

Another challenge we faced was managing the private key that’s linked to the certificate. This key is super important, and any problems like losing it, compromising it, or using it incorrectly can be a real nightmare to sort out. Sometimes, we even had to go through the process of reissuing and reconfiguring the certificate, which can be quite complex.

Lastly, making sure that the cipher suites we choose are both secure and compatible with various client devices and browsers proved to be a bit of a puzzle. It required a deep understanding of cryptography and a watchful eye to maintain security while keeping everything compatible.

Results and Ongoing Progress

When we first joined the development of Invite Club, the project faced numerous challenges, particularly on the front end, due to prior collaborations with less experienced developers.

We embarked on a successful journey to address and resolve all these issues. Through rigorous efforts, we revamped the project using cutting-edge technologies and modern best practices, significantly enhancing its performance and scalability. Additionally, we introduced new features and functionalities to accommodate the evolving project concepts and ideas.

It’s been eight months since we became part of this project, and we continue to work on it. Thanks to the progress and the quality our developers deliver our client feels satisfied with the results we have achieved.

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