Why I created a social network

A few years ago, I started getting interested in web development because of the great opportunity it provides to make an impact both on an individual and a community level. My first contributions were to the speedcubing community (see for instance the WCA website and repository). I enjoyed the experience so much that I just couldn't resist getting more into it.

Fast forward to a few months ago, I wanted to try and solve a problem that has bothered me for years, which is the apparent difficulty that exists to meet people and make new friends on this modern world. I could go way deeper into this, but it falls out of the scope of this post. So, to address the problem, I designed a social network that basically:

1. Connects people according to their interests.
2. Encourages people to go outside and meet others while doing something that they all enjoy.
3. It's as simple as possible.

In order to accomplish those 3 points, the experience goes like this:

1. Create a profile, which requires only the absolutely necessary personal information.
   • For example, the gender is not needed at all, so why request that information in the first place?
2. Select your interests.
3. Be presented with event recommendations in your area.
   • An event can really be anything: go to the cinema, play a basketball game, visit a museum, attend a hackaton, etc.
   • You are also able to create your own events.

That's the very basic functionality, but there's a bit more of stuff in order to provide a more complete experience:

• Each event has its own comments' wall so attendants to it have an easy way to communicate with each other.
• A person can send a friendship request to any other person, which has to be accepted to become friends.
• Private chats between friends.

And that's it! To build all of that, I used React and Material UI for the front end (hosted on Netlify), Node.js and Express.js for the back end (hosted on Heroku), and MongoDB for the database (hosted on MongoDB Atlas). The code is on GitHub, although it isn't open sourced yet for various reasons, but the plan is for it to be -- I can only imagine how amazing it would be to receive contributions from people as interested on the project as I am!

Please visit Tisn - The introverts' social network and let me know what you think about it on the comments' section below! If there's intereste on the topic, I would be very glad to post more about both the technical and the personal side of it.

Thanks for reading!