Technologies

Purpose and Goal

I build Gurpay to meet the needs of my friends in college. My goal was to simplify their current solution of using a whiteboard to track everything and do all of the math. With the addition of the app, they gained many quality of life features that would not have been possible otherwise

Stack Explanation

From the start, I knew that I would need to build an API. This would allow both apps to share the same business logic, and each app would only have to worry about displaying the infomation returend from it. I chose to create native apps for each platform because I have had terrible experiences working with cross platform libraries in the past, and because I already had most of the knowledge required to build each of the native apps.

Problems and thought process

One of the biggest obstacles I encountered on this project was setting up push notifications for both platforms. Going in to the project, I had no knowledge of how they worked or what was required, but after lots of research and trial and error I managed to get them working, so that users could notify each other and recieve notifications when their bills were due.

Lessons Learned

The biggest lesson that I learned in this project is the importance of planning. Since this project has 3 seperate code bases, any change to the API would need to be updated in both apps. Thinking ahead to what will be required was essential to keeping both apps on schedule.