We Spent a Year Building a Dating App That Only Lasted One Week
Behind the scenes of JumboSmash
Code is now available on Github: link
I’ve spent a month figuring out how to tell this story, and now I’m smack in the middle of Senior Week, a little hungover, and have no time to tell it cohesively. You might be a curious Tufts senior, or you might be a rando who has no idea what I’m talking about. Either way, let’s start by throwing flashy stuff at you to grab your attention! 😊
[Note: I’m writing this mostly in my own perspective, but JumboSmash was 100% a team effort. The amazing team: Elif Kınlı, Jared Moskowitz, Jade Chan, Shanshan Duan, Bruno Olmedo, and Justin Sullivan]
Stats and Big Numbers
- The app got about 1 million swipes within 24 hours of it’s launch (currently ~5 million).
- 4 out of 5 people in our year are on the app
- Peak times: midnight of launch (servers almost melted), and mornings (lazy swiping in bed?). Super fun waking up to 30 notifications saying the server is on fire.
- The average JumboSmash session is ~8 minutes long (20mins on launch day)
- 25,000+ matches and counting
- According to Timely, I’ve spent over a thousand hours on this project, which isn’t counting the hours put in from the other 6 team members.
- Over 35,000 lines of code written to build the app (Javascript, React Native). This does not include the backend
Pretty Pictures, Gifs, and Videos
Let me show you some pretty stuff.
This gif shows a series of screenshots we took throughout developing the app. Full album with descriptions here: imgur album
Here’s an image that shows a brief overview of the layout of the app. It’s more complex than I ever thought it would be, and a big part of that was security and privacy.
Number of lines of code written according to Github (25k, 6k, and 3.5k). This doesn’t include Elif’s work, who has been absolutely slaying the backend, or Justin, who made way too beautiful a website than we deserved.
Our servers at launch:
Some of the launch posters designed by the amazing Shanshan:
The Save Button: One of my favorite little interactions in the app. Partially inspired by Microsoft’s Clippy:
Image Loading Tiers: Another cool thing. We load images progressively so that bad internet can’t stop you from smashing:
This little security feature became way more necessary than we thought it would be. Basically, if you change your name too much, we will put your real name on your profile. As the week progressed, we found a steady stream of fake profiles, and even some profiles that were clearly accounts sold to non-seniors.
There are a lot of other little hidden details like this, but let’s move on to something a little more serious
About JumboSmash
In case you’re not a Tufts Senior (or you drank so much that you need reminding) JumboSmash is an (unofficial) Tufts Senior tradition that occurs the week before graduation with the goal of “connecting” students one last time.
Other schools might have a similar tradition with a different name (eg: “Senior Scramble”). It usually looks like a Google Form where you enter the emails of the people you like and someone will email everyone who matches (snore 😪).
Tufts decided to take it a different direction 2 years ago with a web-based Tinder clone. This year we decided to step it up and built a beautifully designed cross-platform mobile application with in-app chat (from scratch). We even took it “beyond” Tinder with tags, ridiculous conversation starters, thirst status, and other random goodies.
It took the entire year and a stupid amount of effort to build this thing, especially given that we knew it would only last one week, but it was totally worth it.
Let’s Learn About the Team!
Jared Moskowitz: My partner in crime. The moment I found out I was inheriting JumboSmash, I roped him in on the shenanigans. We’ve built so many ridiculous things together including a company (WeParty) and various joke projects (twindr). Jared did an unreal job building the chat features in the app. This becomes doubly impressive when you take into account his huge course load and that he’s a Physics & Computer Science double major and an Engineer. Jared is also responsible for many of the hilarious moments in the app and the concept behind the tags feature was his brainchild.
Elif Kinli: I’m not sure my brain has ever clicked with someone else’s as quickly as it did with Elif. We somehow avoided working together for four years and then JumboSmash introduced an opportunity to work with one of the most reliable and hardworking people I’ve ever met. She was responsible for making sure that our app actually did stuff (the backend), and also responsible for stressing out about the server dying so that rest of us didn’t have to. She has immense pride in her work and working with her was just way too fun.
Jade Chan: A total midnight trooper. For various reasons that fell out of our control (including React Native’s heinous update process), Jade’s dev environment consistently refused to play nice. Despite all of these problems, she managed to put together a beautiful auth process that managed the communication between the app and our two backend services.
Bruno Olmedo: For the past year or so, Bruno and I have tackled large projects and events like the Tufts Hackathon and Design Wars. He is my favorite design-minded person to work with and we’ve found that our individual visions tend to swirl together and congeal into beautiful swan sculptures. He’s totally unafraid to call me out or shit on my more awful ideas, but equally unafraid to propose riskier and more creative ideas of his own. He also won’t admit it, but he’s what made design “cool” in our senior class 😉
ShanShan Duan: Bruno and I discovered this amazing tank of raw talent at the aforementioned Design Wars event. She quickly made a name for herself by joining the executive board of JumboCode, and her work became recognizable everywhere on campus. She’s so good that we had to have her on the team, even though she’s not a senior. Actually, let me clarify. When Bruno and I asked her to be a part of the team, we knew she wasn’t a senior, but we had no idea what year she was until a few weeks ago when we finally asked. Ultimately, we just didn’t care, we just had to have her on the team. All of the love and care she put into this project oozes out of the interface, and people just can’t stop commenting on how beautiful it looks. Also, she is officially the first woman to ever work on JumboSmash, so that’s cool.
Justin Sullivan: We roped this beautiful man in last minute, and he built a website like no project on Tufts campus has ever seen. People have literally come up to me and told me they’ve never seen websites do what jumbosmash.com does. Justin and I batted project ideas around before this, looking for opportunities to work together. In the end, I’m super glad I got to work with him before he leaves forever to go do amazing things.
FAQs (ran out of creative ideas to tell this story)
Q1: Why did you build this?
A1: Not sure, really. It was passed on to me, and I just had this urge to make it so absurdly good for no other reason than to do it. I managed to rope together a really great team, so it then became about using technologies and techniques that we were individually interested in using.
Q2: How long did it take you?
A2: The entire senior year more or less. According to a time-tracking app I use, I personally spent almost a thousand hours coding and working with the rest of the team (this doesn’t include their hours). I started thinking about it in September, formed the team around October, and we started writing code in November.
Q2: What was the hardest part?
A2: I can’t speak for the other team members, but physically the hardest part for me was dealing with Apple. It seemed that Apple didn’t love the idea of a week-long app that was so extra-sexual. It was also many late nights in a row trying to get all the permissions and certificates to work with our various technologies. If that’s a boring answer, here’s another: being “done”. It was really hard being done because you’re never done. When we launched, we thought we were done but we constantly got emails and never got to take our hands off the wheel. Then we had to redo several parts of the backend because we had way more signups than we predicted. And finally, we did the whole server reset thing, which was smack in the middle of our own senior week (i.e. we were drunk all the time). Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing all of it, but it was still pretty tough.
Q3: What was your favorite part?
A3: The beginning was fun because it was exciting and ideas were exploding without consequence. The middle was fun because we got to solve technical problems and fight for things we wanted. The end was fun because we got to get drunk and realize “Oh shit, I’m actually close friends with these people now”.
Q4: Is Bruno Single?
A4: Why yes, yes he is.
Q5: How did people react?
A5: Positively! A lot of people came up to me to tell me nice things about it, which was super flattering (and a little anxiety-inducing). I did have a few weird moments where people yelled things at me. People got pretty mad at me for taking so long to reset the servers, and then people got mad at me for resetting the servers. One drunk jock-looking kid called me a fascist for putting check marks next to the developers’ profiles. That doesn’t even make any sense. Was it self-congratulatory? Oh for sure. But does it make me a fascist? I had to google it just to be 100% sure, but pretty sure it doesn’t.
Q6: Any funny stories?
A6: Tons! I showed my it off to my dad and told him to mess around with it but not swipe right on anyone. After ten seconds of tapping around, he swiped right on five people in a row before laughing at me for not getting a match.
