Digital Closet App

Problems and Thought Process

The project is organized using NX monorepo. It helped with code sharing across the full stack of the project, and streamlined the development process.

Using Flutter allowed fast, effecient and robust development process. Flutter has a lot of built-in material widgets, which made it easy to rapidly prototype and focus on the actual app functionality.

Flutter also has a number of built-in testing tools, which were helpful in writing automated tests. Using stager package (a storybook alternative) simplified developing parts of the app in isolation, and writing automated tests. It was especially helpful in developing hard to reach widgets.

One of the problems I encountered during development was ensuring consistency of data transfer objects between the Dart/Flutter app and Typescript/NodeJs server. Using gRPC and Protocol Buffers fixed that, with the added benefit of smaller message sizes.

The most challenging aspect of the project was synchronization and offline first approach. The user needed to be able to use the app offline on any number of devices, and when those devices go online, everything should be synchronized. CRDTs, Hybrid Logical Clocks, and Merkle Trees were essential in ensuring effeciency and integrity of data synchronization.

Lessons Learned & Future Work

This is the first project I combined Flutter, NodeJs, gRPC. gRPC and Protocol Buffers. There were some hiccups, but most things went pretty smoothly. I liked defining services in protobuf files, and generting clients based on those files, it removed a lot of boilerplate code and potential human error in defining clients for remote services.

Learning CRDTs, Hybrid Logical Clocks, and Merkle Trees was very interesting. I am looking forward to using them in future projects.

Progress / Todo

1. Web app to access community, clothes and outfits
2. Subscriptions and payments
3. Automatically remove background of taken photos