LiveCommunity · Community · Full-Stack
Wildmate
A place for outdoor crews to find each other, plan the trip, and handle the logistics in one product.
- Role
- Solo full-stack engineer · product through deployment
- Timeline
- 2025 – Present
- Focus
- Full-Stack · Backend
- Stack
- React 19, Node.js, Express, MongoDB
Overview
Wildmate is a community product for hikes, paddles, climbs, and similar trips. People discover a trip, join a crew, and coordinate permits, gear, meals, carpools, and cost.
The problem
Outdoor adventurers had no single place to find crews, plan trips, and handle the logistics — permits, gear, carpools — around hikes, paddles, and climbs.
The approach
Full-stack monorepo: React 19 + Vite frontend, Express 5 + MongoDB API, Socket.io real-time trip chat, and Magic Paste — paste a messy trip idea and get a structured itinerary with geocoded waypoints — live at wildmate.app.
The product, live
The pages worth opening. Each one is the real product — click through.
01HomeFind people, pick a place, plan the outing, then share it.
02ExploreSix lanes: trails, water, adventure, slow days, hobbies, and drives.
03OutingsSearch hikes, paddles, and climbs by hub, activity, and distance.
04TrailsPlaces to go, with the stats up front.
05PermitsLottery deadlines, closures, and park alerts in one bulletin.
06Park kitsA few signature activities per park, then an outing with a crew.What it does
Finding a crew
Trip discovery and crew matching across 15+ US metro hubs, with member approvals before someone is in.
Magic Paste
Paste a messy trip idea and get a structured itinerary with geocoded waypoints. Several model providers sit behind it, so a draft still comes back if one fails.
The day of the trip
Socket.io chat plus shared logistics: gear, meals, carpools, permits, and costs, on the same trip.
How I worked
Made the trip the object everything hangs on: place, crew, permits, and cost.
Built the React frontend and the Express and MongoDB API together, then added real-time chat on that same trip.
Brought Magic Paste in after the core loop worked, with a fallback chain across model providers.
Challenges
A paragraph is not a plan
People describe a trip in a mess of notes. Turning that into waypoints and stops had to fail softly when a model or a geocoder did.
One trip, many writers
Chat, gear, and approvals all change the same trip. The product had to keep those updates about one crew, not a pile of side threads.
Shipping the whole thing
This was the first product I took from the data model through a public deploy, then changed because people used it.
What shipped
Live at wildmate.app
15+ metro hubs, real-time trip coordination, and Magic Paste AI drafting.
- React 19
- Node.js
- Express
- MongoDB
- Socket.io
- Vite
What I learned
How to ship end-to-end: database design, real-time features, deployment, and iterating from user feedback. This taught me production full-stack ownership.
