My dating app has this function where I rank user based on an algorithm which takes their last login date, and some other ‘factors’.

I thought this was gonna be easy. Well, it would’ve been if I wanted to take the entire collection to the client, the use JS to calculate the field, sort, and display to user.

Problem is, I can’t load the entire collection. That’s thousands of users. I have to sort BEFORE I return the result. Which means I have to sort at the database level before I return the results, which was quite challenging.

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First of all, if you need to do payment with Meteor, I’d highly recommend using Stripe or Braintree. Their API is much simpler, better UX, everything … so why am I using PayPal?

Well Stripe is not in my country, and Braintree beta rejected our application because it’s a dating website!!!! *face palm*

Anyways, without much other choice, I went with the PayPal basic payment HTML form, submit to pay on their site, and return data with IPN (Instant Payment Notifications). It’s friggin stone-age technology but heck it still works.

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Image upload is one of those pretty daunting things for beginner programmer (myself before I finish this). Luckily good folks that use meteor has already done the bulk of the work for us.

However, it’s still no simple feat to put it all together. I used the dropzone.js package for the drag-and-drop client-side image handling, then use CollectionFS to handle storing image record in database and upload to Amazon S3 as well.

There’s also a great package someone wrote to compress and correct orientation, saved my life! : ccorcos:clientside-image-manipulation.

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After having an unknown redirect if logged in bug for a week or so (well actually realizing it for a week, but it’s been there since beginning), I finally realized how to fix it.

I had the following code:

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