Cimerat

The home feed is a list of rooms, each with a photo carousel, the price per month, how many rooms the flat has, how many people already live there and whether they mind if you're a man or a woman. Photos load with a blurhash placeholder, so the feed shows a blurred preview straight away instead of grey boxes. Your own rooms are marked "Listimi yt" and have edit and delete buttons right on the card.

People type Albanian in a lot of different ways. Some skip the "ë" and "ç", and city names change their ending depending on the sentence, so "peje", "pejë" and "Peja" all mean the same place. The search on the server strips the endings and treats "e" and "ë", and "c" and "ç", as the same letter, so all of those find Peja. Every word has to match something, whether that's a city, a neighbourhood or the owner's name, and typing a number like "300" finds rooms within 50€ of that price.

Next to the search there are filters for city, neighbourhood, price and number of rooms. The neighbourhood filter stays disabled until you pick a city, because the list of neighbourhoods depends on it.

Creating a listing takes up to 10 photos. You can tap a photo to move it, and the first one becomes the main photo on the card. The most common cities are one tap away as chips under the dropdown.

On the server, Express takes the upload with multer and sharp rotates each photo the right way up, resizes it and saves it as a progressive JPEG, then works out its blurhash. In production the photos go to Cloudinary, since Heroku clears its disk every time the app restarts.

If you don't have a room and need one, you post yourself instead: the city you're looking in, your budget, your age and a few lines about you. Budgets have quick picks from 150€ up, and the form is built with react-hook-form and zod, so mistakes show up next to the field before anything is sent. Your post becomes a public profile with your budget at the top, which owners can open from the Cimerat tab.

Everything you've posted lives under your profile, split into your listings and your account details. Saving shows a small toast at the top, rooms you like go into favourites, and the side menu gets you anywhere in the app. Accounts use JWT with passwords hashed by bcrypt.

The first version had a yellow header on every screen and yellow buttons everywhere. It worked, but it felt loud, and the yellow fought with the room photos. In the redesign I made the app mostly white and black and kept the yellow for a few things: the dot in the logo, the add button and whatever you've selected.

The app is React Native with Expo and Expo Router, in TypeScript. Data comes through React Query, the carousels use Reanimated, and the shared components (buttons, inputs, chips, the image picker grid) have their own tests with Jest and Testing Library. The same code also runs on the web through react-native-web, with a separate carousel for desktop.

The API is Node and Express with MongoDB and Mongoose, hosted on Heroku, and the iOS builds go through EAS.