I have been tinkering with the idea of creating a dating app for my university for quite some time now — A lightweight platform to discover people at Near East University.

How would it work? That is the same question I asked myself perpetually for the last year. Yesterday (Sunday 26 July 2020), I figured what better way to figure that out than to build an MVP and see what sticks.

I spent the better part of yesterday till 4 am today morning on my keyboard and sketching like a mad man and finally, the site is live

Bambi dating…

I recently implemented the birthday feature and alpha tested it.

In the event that it is a user’s birthday today, the app displays a cake emoticon next to their username and sends a notification to their followers to wish them on this day

This is the first practical instance of this feature with it being Harun’s birthday. So, Happy 20 Harun!

I just added the ability to write posts in Markdown. Here is the first post edited and rendered in Markdown

Markdown ability is only limited to the post/new route and posts added through the home page are not rendered as markdown. This is because of styling constraints and also to limit home page posts to shorter and more rapid messages

Moreover, I added a section where all user photos are shown in their profile. This is called Albums for now and will morph into a more visually interactive feature later on.

When viewing a user’s profile, you can now view…

I spent the most of this fine friday hacking away a solution for the messaging feature on Bambi.

Now, users can see their chat history all together and reply like a conventional chat application as opposed to the previous implementation where you could only send a message at once without any context of the last message sent / received.

Here is the video on Bambi’s Twitter Account

This has taken me quite a while to create. Thats it.

هارون

Yesterday night I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if a guest user could view a user profile? I argued against this a few months ago since it literally ruins the essence of regular users having to follow each other to view each others posts

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love users to follow, know each other and have meaningful conncections. However, it doesn’t work really well for non users who just want to view a profile.

So I decided to remove the ‘login_required’ requirements from the profile page and restructured most of the logic in the profile template…

With the new user update, comes new changes too!

You can now see when a user joined Bambi to add authenticity to legitimate accounts. Moreover, the age field now shows how many years ago you were born dynamically instead of the static age field from before.

The new profile update also includes the gender of the user. If you follow the user, you can see when was the last time they were online / active on Bambi.

If a user is of the opposite gender and is single, you can see links to their Instagram and Snapchat profiles is available.

In this new update of Bambi, I worked more on the backend to accomodate the infrastructure for the upcoming Bambi Dating Feature. But first, I wish to discuss the anonymous posting feature I teased before on Bambi Beta

Anonymous Posting

Wished you would say something just to get it out or to see people’s honest unbiased opinion. Well now Bambi has an anonymous posting feature

No one will know it was you. The post wont even appear on your profile posts. The only way you would know it was you is cause you’ll still have the edit / delete button on your…

I just stumbled upon the new Facebook update with dark mode and a simplified user experience.

I can’t help but marvel at how similar it looks to Bambi

هارون