Tattooday

The tattoo industry had no unified digital platform where artists, convention organizers, and enthusiasts could connect meaningfully. Artists lacked a dedicated space to showcase portfolios and manage bookings beyond generic social media. Convention organizers had no streamlined tools for promotion, artist coordination, and RSVP management. Enthusiasts had no reliable way to discover artists by style, location, or specialization.

From an engineering standpoint, we faced a significant architectural challenge: building a platform that served three fundamentally different user types — each with distinct workflows, permissions, and data models — within a single cohesive mobile application. Performance-critical features like camera integration, high-resolution image processing, and real-time messaging required custom native modules that couldn't be achieved with standard React Native bridges alone.

We architected and built Tattooday from the ground up using React Native with Expo as the foundation, supplemented by custom Kotlin modules for Android and Swift modules for iOS to handle camera access, image processing pipelines, and real-time features that demanded native-level performance.

The backend runs on Fastify with Node.js, chosen for its low overhead and high throughput — critical for handling concurrent image uploads and real-time messaging. Firebase Firestore serves as the primary database, providing real-time sync capabilities that power the social feed, direct messaging, and live contest voting without polling.

The app delivers portfolio showcasing with high-quality media and zoom capabilities, booking schedule management with timezone support across North America, location-based artist discovery using geolocation queries, direct messaging with read receipts, monthly artist contests with community voting and leaderboards, and comprehensive convention management tools including RSVP tracking and geographic event targeting.

We deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk behind a load balancer to handle traffic spikes during convention seasons when platform usage surges. The entire CI/CD pipeline was configured for automated builds and over-the-air updates via Expo, enabling rapid iteration without app store review delays.