From knowing nothing about coding to cloning an app in four days

A project of cloning a dating app.

Deadline of four days.

A team of three.

The Journey

I joined Masai School with no knowledge of coding. I knew that it’ll be tough for me. But I was ready to put in hard work. As expected, it was hard but with some help, I pulled off the first four weeks, and by the end of the four weeks, we were divided into groups of three. Each group was asked to clone a dating app. We got the app, TrulyMadly. All three of us connected on a call and discussed the plan to complete the app. And again, even everyone in my group had no coding background. So we knew that we’d have tough competition but we decided that we will give our cent percent.

The Start

Since we weren’t taught most of the functionality part, we decided to make screens that look similar since we’ve had extensive assignments on layouts. We thought we’d connect them with the knowledge that we have and give validation wherever necessary. After making initial screens, we had the biggest hurdle to cross i.e., GitHub. We had an idea about what it was but it was on simple text files. We never did it with code and the main issue was with merge conflicts. So we lost an entire day and by the end of it, we weren’t able to solve it. But by the next day afternoon, we got the hang of it and we started making the next screens.

The Middle

We nested many views to get the scroll view that was similar to the app. It took time to solve the issues but we were able to complete it on the second day. The individual work that was happening was very less since we were getting the hang of how to work as a team as each of us needed another one’s help for the app to come out as planned. We made profile screens for both the female and male options i.e., you’d get female profiles if you’d select male while signing up and you’d get male profiles if you’d select female while signing up. But most of our time was spent solving each other’s issues and since most of what we were learned was on layouts, we gave more time for similar-looking screens rather than functionality. And because of that, we didn’t have time to figure out how to get different screens on selecting the male and female radio buttons in the signup screen.

The End

We stopped working on it, the night before the presentation and started practicing for the presentation because we knew that if we couldn’t present what we did in an effective way, all the hard work we had put in would go to waste. So although we had time to better some things, we used that time for 4 dry runs of the presentation and we got the timing right i.e., under 5 minutes. We gave a decent presentation. I knew how good other apps were looking and wasn’t expecting to cut it to the top 6 but Nrupul’s message that we’d missed it by a small margin really made me happy. It was a kind of reminder that our hard work didn’t go in vain and was recognized. Overall it was a great journey where I learned how to make an app in 4 days and more importantly, I learned how to function as a team.