Joel Dorrington

KinFeed is a dynamic social app I built using the MEAN stack as a Christmas gift for my family. It’s designed to be a place for them to share photos and memories with each other, without the relentless distraction of Facebook.

They’re able to create posts and choose the visibility: whether it’s publicly visible, or privately shared between themselves and the recipient. They can also create threads to collect public posts of a common theme.

I learned so much about back-end development with this project. It was my first experience with ajax calls in angular.js, photo uploading and file handling, and more.

The biggest problem I encountered, though there were many minor issues I had to overcome along the way, was the file storage. In my development environment I was storing uploaded photos on disk, with the app source files.

However, on deployment to heroku – a week before the reveal on Christmas day – I realised that the photos were being wiped every time heroku reinitialized the app. I was heart broken. I was sure it was ready!

I did some research, discovered the problem and began looking for a solution. That’s when I came across Amazon S3. I spent a few days tinkering and figuring out how to integrate the service with my current app.

In the end it was a success and the app was ready for launch. The project was the definition of error-driven development but once the dust cleared I was proud of myself and what I’d created. I plan to make a few updates to it in the future, when I make some time.

If you’d like to use the guest account to take a look around and explore the functionality, email me to ask for the log in details.