Events & Booking Platform

The problem

Booking platforms live or die on trust: organisers need to get paid reliably, participants need identity verification before high-value events, and admins need to know when something needs attention without refreshing a dashboard all day.

Architecture

An Express and MongoDB service backing both a React web client and a React Native app. The domain is wider than 'events': hosts submit event requests that move through an approval workflow, participants join and are managed per event, hosts are paid out, and the whole thing is wrapped in a growth layer — influencers with their own trackable coupons, generic coupon campaigns, ad banners, brand placements, and newsletters. Reviews are collected after the fact by a scheduled job rather than prompted inline. Razorpay handles payouts, refunds, and participant transactions; Onfido verifies identity with webhook-driven status updates rather than polling; media goes to S3. Notification delivery is split across dedicated controllers per channel — SendGrid for email, WhatsApp, and Slack — and further scheduled jobs handle address normalisation and geocoding.

The mobile client

The same backend serves a React Native app shipped to both stores, which is where most participants actually book. Payments and identity run through native SDKs rather than web views — Razorpay's native checkout and Onfido's native capture flow — because document capture and payment authorisation both degrade badly in an embedded browser.

• —Firebase across three roles: analytics, push messaging, and Crashlytics for field crash reporting.
• —i18next for localisation, Reanimated and a native gesture stack for the interaction work.
• —Shipping one product across a web client, a native app, and the backend behind both meant API changes had to stay compatible with a store-review release cycle — the app can't be redeployed on demand the way the web client can.

Decisions

Stack