FESTIGRAL APP

The Festigral App was one of the major projects that I had the pleasure of working on. The development process for this application was difficult to say the least. There were several major challenges that my team and I faced, and multiple setbacks that were cause by things that I should not speak of.

Nevertheless, we pulled through and managed to create something truly amazing. This project was mainly in development between early 2022 through mid 2023. It consisted of many different technologies crammed together in a neat and tiny package that can be accessed by millions of people around the world.

Let me talk about some of the major things that I contributed to.

 

 

Major Technologies And Languages Used

That I can talk about of course…

Flutter
Node JS
Dart
Pub
Javascript
Typescript
Firebase
Google Cloud Platform
Asynchronous Computation
Regex

 

 

Frontend and Backend Integration

A Whole Lot Of Computers Talking To Each Other

One of the major things that I was tasked with was designing and building a reliable system that allowed users see when other users participated in certain events that took place on the application. After testing several solutions including one I built from scratch, I landed on Firebase (by Google). It seemed to offer everything that was needed to make the app function according to specifications.

While Firebase handled how data was going to be accessed, I still had to create a database structure that was performant at scale. So I came up with a way that allowed lots of users to access, use, and read/write data to the backend without costing a fortune, while systematically removing unused data to keep the database clean and small.

With that all sorted, it was just a matter of making sure that the frontend updated accordingly. That, granted, was the easy part, and only took using industry standard state management tools.

Integration was simple enough and with a little elbow grease, a lot of technical know-how, and a couple sparks of creative genius, the app was connected and working at scale.

 

 

Dynamic Data Loading

Fast And Lazy At The Same Time

It’s one thing if your app is fast, but it’s a completely different thing when a fast app gets bogged down by API’s that take forever to load. So one of the next major tasks that I was assigned to handle was speeding up that process.

I itemized all the external calls that the app made and loaded them dynamically. This insured that people were still able to access the and use it without having to wait for everything to be loaded at once. It also considerably sped up initial load times and made the overall experience much more inviting.

I also created systems that allowed for data to only be loaded when it was request by the user. It may seems trivial, but using a system that utilizes this principal goes a long way to cutting down on unnecessary data loading and only show what the user ‘wanted’ to see.

While there is the dreaded load time that users have to sit through when waiting for data to be retrieved, our entire team agreed it was a better experience instead of having users wait astronomically longer for everything to be loaded when the user launched the app.

 

 

The Look And Feel

She a pretty thing ain’t she

One of the major roles that I have to handle was creating the front end. Our team of designers handled most of the creative work on what they wanted it to look like. Having others handle the ‘look’ made actually building the thing that much more straightforward. While I did come up with my own ‘look’ for this app, sometimes it’s best to let the artists do what they do best.

All I needed to do was take what they envisioned and put it in code. This was arguably the simplest task that I had to work on. Time consuming, but simple. It did have its perks though once everything was coded in and there was a physical version of their designs that people could interact with.