Social app

Niche

A social plans app for finding what's happening nearby and making plans with the people who matter.

About

Niche is a map-first social app that answers one question: what is happening near me right now? You open a map, see plans and hotspots around you, and pull your people into them. It runs in production at nicheapp.ca with separate development and production environments and a controlled release process.

What I built

The product model: plans, hotspots, and niches, including the migration from a fixed four-way mode split to open-ended niches
The API and background workers, and the production web client and public site
Versioned API contracts, with an automated naming guard that fails a change which reintroduces retired terms
Gated releases from a separate development environment into production, with continuous health checks

The product

The map is the home screen

Plans and hotspots are the two things a person sees. A plan is something people are doing; a hotspot is somewhere things are happening. Both live on the map first and in lists second.

Niches instead of categories

A niche is an interest that connects people to plans. The picker is searchable and free-text with member counts, a person can belong to many, and a plan carries one or more. The Map and Discover views filter by whichever niche you pick.

Plans that update live

Each plan has a real-time channel, so the people in it see changes as they happen rather than on refresh.

Shareable outside the app

Every plan and venue has a server-rendered share page, so a link sent to someone without the app still shows the plan.

Stack

PythonFastAPIPostgreSQLRedisNext.jsWebSockets

At a glance

Find what's happening nearby and make plans around it
Live in production at nicheapp.ca
Separate dev and production environments with gated releases
Continuously health-checked; incidents auto-detected