No White Walls

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The online platform "No White Walls" helps tenants to find housing in the UK, book it and go through all the steps leading to rental agreement. Owners of dwellings and buildings can add and advertise their offers on a monthly subscription basis.

HOW IT STARTED

This project was created as an alternative to the high cost of housing in the UK. The goal was to simplify the process of renting, as well as to popularize the idea of coliving. The platform was initially developed on WordPress. But it stopped meeting the owners' requirements over time. So, they turned to our team to move the project into another software solution.

BENEFITS

FOR DIRECT USERS

An opportunity to find housing for long-term rent at a reasonable price.

Simplification of the process of viewing and registration of rental housing.

FOR BUSINESS

Homeowners can post their ads and, with a special subscription plan, hire an agent to facilitate management.

Simplified organizational work for real estate agents.

CUSTOMER'S PROBLEMS

COMMERCIAL

Development of an online platform that will serve as the basis for creating a co-living community.

TECHNICAL

WordPress wasn't flexible enough for adding advanced functions. So, the application had to be reworked.

The necessity of integration with Stripe and GoCardless payment systems.

The high speed and stability of the application were crucial.

CHALLENGES FOR THE TEAM

Creation of a simple and lightweight serverless solution.

Airtable was used as a backend. It has a number of technical limitations that had to be taken into account.

The structure of a single page application required additional optimization to facilitate indexing and sharing in social networks.

MISTAKES MADE AND CORRECTED

The limits on the number of queues to the AirTable API required the development of a module for transferring data from Airtable to Postgres. It allowed queueing not to the Airtable, but to our API and transferred the load to our server.

The combination of serverless architecture and AirTable led to a security risk. The solution was to use an intermediate module. It was designed to bypass the limit on the number of queues.

Due to Airtable limitations on direct uploading of user files, intermediate storage was created based on S3.

ALEX SLOBOZHAN

Get a free week trial to see the best possible solutions for upgrading your project

THE PROJECT NOW

TECHNICAL SCHEME OF THE PROJECT

LIST OF FEATURES

Integration with Stripe and GoCardless payment systems.

Integration with Google Maps.

Integration with Imfuna service to simplify the room inspection process.

A system of notifying users about bookings, payments and other events.

5 subscription plans with various service packages.

A wide range of filters and search criteria for selecting suitable options.

FRONTEND & BACKEND & DATABASE

Vue.js

Node.js

Airtable

PostgreSQL

EXTERNAL AMAZON SERVICES

Cognito

EC2

Route 53

Lambda

CloudWatch

CloudFront

DEPLOYMENT

AWS

Portainer

SOLVED PROBLEMS

COMMERCIAL

The main functionality of the platform is built.

The new features are being developed to implement the idea of coliving community.

TECHNICAL

Implementation of a serverless project architecture that provides fast scaling at a low cost.

The platform is built as a single page application, which significantly speeds it up.

Creation of a system for building reports based on data from the database using Google Data Studio.

LESSONS LEARNED

It is important to discuss with the customer the introduction of all changes, because suddenly arising additional tasks can significantly shift the release date.