shy-bi

Synopsis

A dating app for shy bi-sexuals and bi-curious people. Uses React for fast performance and Neo4j for relational data storage.

Motivation

Researchers say bi-sexuals are less likely to come out because they are afraid of being perceived as "confused." ShyBi hopes to provide a safe place for these individuals so they may explore their sexual identity without fear of judgment.

Get Started

Neo4j

If you don't have neo4j installed locally, make sure to install it. On MacOS, you can run brew install neo4j. If brew throws an error concerning an unmet requirement, install that one, too (brew will let you know which ones).

brew services start neo4j

Head on over to http://localhost:7474/browser/ from your browser. The initial password for the username neo4j is neo4j. Enter that password and change the password when prompted. Store these information in your .env

# .env
NEO4J_URI=bolt://localhost:7687
NEO4J_USERNAME=neo4j
NEO4J_PASSWORD=neo4j

Dependencies

# if using npm
npm i

# if using yarn
yarn

Start Server

# if using npm
npm run dev

# if using yarn
yarn dev

What Works Currently

• Signing up
• Logging in
• Editing profile
• Searching and filtering users by age and sex
• Liking and unliking user
• Matching

This app has been significantly revamped from its previous state in the following ways

1. Upgraded to neo4j v4 from v1.
2. Introduced nextjs to enable server-side rendering. Previously, everything was being client-side-rendered.
3. Tore out almost all material-ui styling and replaced it with custom scss.
4. Fixed the backend that was storing user properties as relationship data

// previously
MERGE (userCity: City {name: {city}})
MERGE (userAge: Age {age: {age}})
MERGE (userSex: Sex {sex: {sex}})

MERGE (newUser)-[:LIVES_IN]->(userCity)
MERGE (newUser)-[:YEARS_OLD]->(userAge)
MERGE (newUser)-[:MEMBER_OF]->(userSex)

// now
MATCH (user:User {username: {username}})
SET
user.name = {name},
user.email = {email},
user.birthday = date({birthday}),
user.edLevel = {edLevel},
user.aboutMe = {aboutMe},
user.sex = {sex}

5. Enabled reading cookies to render authenticated pages server-side.
6. Reconciled data type discrepancies between neo4j and JavaScript using a custom function (See this Github issue for details). Essentially, JS was not able to parse 64-bit integer data being stored in neo4j.

// server/utils/convert.js

function intsToNumbers(object) {
  const newObj = {};
  for (const key in object) {
    const value = object[key];
    if (neo4j.isInt(value)) {
      const newVal = value.toNumber();
      newObj[key] = newVal;
    }
  }
  return newObj;
}

7. Removed a lot of dead code and no-longer-used reducers and actions.

Roadmap

This app is obviously still in bad shape! The following will need to be fixed.

1. /match page
2. /messagespage
3. /recommended page --> this is perhaps the coolest feature about this app!