Grouper is an “Offline Social Club” who joined YCombinator in 2012.

In 2013 Grouper decided to pivot towards a mobile-first experience, and I was brought onboard contracting as a senior full-stack developer.

I worked under the guidance of Tom Blomfield, Tom Brown and Michael Waxman to deliver the backend services that powered the platform.

As part of an ongoing initiative, we frequenlty built off-shoot products and experiments in order to test our assumptions about our market. Each iteration went from conception to market in less than 2 weeks.

In particular, our team built an a number of ReactJS applications, one of which was “drinkup”.

In less than 2 weeks we built and released a cross-platform mobile application. “Drinkup” allowed our users to query bars we had partnered with in New York City, and receive free drinks as part of promotional events.

In order to deliver the product on time, we used the ReactJS framework to render our frontend application and BackboneJS to manage the frontend state, opting for a simpler model than the standard redux solution which is often used with React.