Lost&Found
By
@yeagerist
- 12 Devlogs
- 20 Total hours
Its an efficient and effective; easy to use platform for people to get back their lost valueables.
52m 24s logged
it seems the css wasnt responding well in feed page after the hosting.
took me some time but i’ve fixed the code and it works as expected now :)
27m 15s logged
just improved the Readme a bit
nothing much nothing more
showed for review and now adjusted as per the recommendations.
Now the next thing is finally the shipping of project
Optimistic to hear your says on this😄😄
2h 21m 14s logged
I spent some time cleaning up the frontend code and styles to make the app faster and easier to maintain.
Split up bloated pages: Broke down massive files like Item Detail, Recovery Requests, Feed, and Navbar into smaller subcomponents (modals, media previews, contact info, filters). Now editing one UI block won’t risk breaking the whole page.
Fixed React state quirks: Switched Feed categories to derive directly with useMemo to skip extra re-renders, fixed initial edit form state, and added cleanup guards on API calls so navigating away doesn’t trigger memory leak warnings.
Cleaned up the CSS: Replaced duplicated skeleton loaders and empty-state styles across 5 files with shared rules in index.css. Swapped hardcoded colors and overlays across all stylesheets for theme tokens so dark and light modes behave properly everywhere.
Ship #1
Changes requested
I built Lost&Found mainly with the aim to make finding lost belongings a little less painful. Yes, it was a result of some disappointing personal experience. Instead of having to search through different media groups or hope someone sees your post, you can report a lost or found item here and let the system look for possible matches.
The main part I’m proud of is the matching system. Lost and found posts are compared using things like category, description, location and dates to find possible matches, and users can get notified when one is found. I also added the usual stuff around it like authentication, notifications, resolving recovered cases, an admin dashboard, and as always a light/dark mode.
It might seem quite like “Okay now how the hell am i supposed to use it then?”
Here’s something important.
A quick way to test it: create an account → make a Lost Item post → create another account →create a matching Found Item post with similar details → check the notifications/matches → if it’s the right item, you can resolve the case.
(You can also try the flow the other way around by posting a found item first.)
The backend is hosted through render and may take a LITTLE time to load but please be patient for a few seconds and the flow’s gonna go as mentioned above
1h 6m 31s logged
Finally got the main workflow of Lost&Found working!
The posting flow and matching system are connected now, so users can actually post lost or found items and the backend can go through the matching logic to find possible matches. I also finished up the remaining bits around resolving cases, notifications, and the other backend connections.
I’ve now made the project deployable too. The frontend is hosted on Vercel and the backend is running on Render, and I’ve connected the two so the live app can actually communicate with the backend.
There are obviously still things I can improve later, but for now the main workflow is working properly and the project is finally ready to ship.
1h 45m 11s logged
Been working on connecting the rest of the backend now.
I got the resolving part done so when someone gets their item back, they can mark the case as resolved and it gets taken out of the active feed instead of sitting there like it’s still available. I also worked on the privacy policy agreement during signup, making sure that gets properly handled instead of just being a checkbox that does nothing.
Apart from that I’ve connected the remaining reports, notifications, matching and user posts so they all actually talk to the backend properly. Most of the main stuff is pretty much done now, just a few small things left to fix and test.
After that it should finally be ready to ship. Next devlog is basically going to be getting everything ready for deployment😋
2h 6m 4s logged
FINALLLLYY
I’ve worked on the matching system. This is what the whole app was all about tbh.
The backend compares lost and found posts instead of just showing everything as a possible match. It looks at things like the item category, description/details, location, and dates, so a lost wallet and a found wallet in a completely different place or with an impossible date won’t just get treated the same. I’m also working on the backend logic that calculates these matches and sends the relevant results back to the frontend.
A certain kinda post and match is successfully tested and its GREEN > <
but there’s still some testing to do with different combinations of posts and I’m not confident about it yet :’(
55m 3s logged
I’ve started working more on the backend! This time I focused on the lost and found reporting system, making sure the reports actually get sent through the API and saved properly in MongoDB. Each report is linked to the user who created it, along with things like the category, description, location, date, and image info. I also added some validation so the backend doesn’t just accept whatever the frontend sends. There were a few annoying little issues between the form, authentication, API and database, but I’ve got the main flow working now.
1h 12m 24s logged
This time I worked on adding light and dark mode. Previously the button was just sitting there doing nothing.
Now the app can adapt to the user’s system theme instead of forcing them to pick one manually. If someone has their device set to dark mode, Lost&Found can follow that preference, while still giving them the option to switch between light and dark mode themselves.
Still doing some small tweaks here and there, but this might be the final goodbye to frontend now
1h 12m 45s logged
Today I worked on the admin dashboard.
The idea behind it is to give me a simple overview of what’s happening across the platform instead of having to dig through individual reports.
It includes stats for total lost reports, found reports, resolved cases, recovery rate, average resolution time, and the most common item categories.
It doesn’t look the best but works for now..
1h 8m 57s logged
Okay the progress is
I made a few changes and improvements across the app to make the main user flow feel more complete. Up untill now was just the frontend part.
I’ve also started working on the backend side of things, connecting the frontend features with the actual application logic and getting the necessary API functionality in place.
There’s still quite a bit to connect and test, but the project is gradually moving from just having separate features to having everything work together as one proper application.
54m 44s logged
I spent this session working on more of the Lost&Found frontend. I worked on the news feed, the UI for reporting both lost and found items, and the notifications frontend.
One thing I also noticed with Stardance: when I linked my other Hackatime projects (i was working on separate directories for client and server side) to this project, their tracked time got added to the time shown on my previous devlog. My first devlog originally showed around 1 hour, but after linking those projects it changed to 6h . It didn’t work like that previously on Flavortown.
Other than that, the frontend is coming together and I’m getting closer to having the main Lost → Match → Notification flow fully connected.
6h 3m 45s logged
I’m working on a web-app which I’ve named ‘Lost&Found’.
As the name suggests, it’s a community help oriented, supportive, efficient and easy to use application which people can hop onto to search for their lost belongings. The idea is to create match between lost items and found items based on their descriptions and filters to finally get a confidence match score of whether the item is actually the one the user is looking for ( basically checking if lost-item = found-item )
For now, the actual countable work i’ve done is created a few icons for the web_app and finalised on one which is followed by same favicon.
