Breaking into the city's live music scene
Project Goal: Develop a mobile-first application that scrapes and aggregates event data from local venues, creating a centralized hub to discover live concerts and gigs across Hamilton.
Tech Stack: Expo, React Native,Express, TypeScript, Node.js, Supabase
this project is currently in development!
Introduction
Living in Hamilton, there is a fantastic local music scene. The problem? Actually finding out who is playing and where. You usually have to dig through five different venue Instagram pages, scattered flyers, or obscure websites just to figure out what gigs are happening this weekend.
As part of the Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) at McMaster University, a team of us decided to actually solve this. We wanted to build a platform that automatically aggregates these local events into one clean interface—all while contributing to a production-grade codebase.
That’s how Corkboard was born.
Under the Hood: The Architecture
The Mobile Front-End (Expo): We designed Corkboard to be a mobile-first experience. By building the client with Expo (React Native), we can maintain a single, clean codebase that compiles to both iOS and Android natively. It makes the barrier to entry for new GDSC contributors much lower while still delivering a highly responsive, app-store-ready mobile experience.
The Back-End & Data Aggregation: To keep the server scalable, we implemented a strict Three-Tier Architecture (Presentation → Application → Database):
- The API & Services: We built a RESTful Node.js backend. By decoupling our API routes from the core business logic (services), the code remains modular and much easier for new club members to test and contribute to.
- The Database: We rely on Supabase (PostgreSQL) to handle our relational data—tying users, venues, events, and bookmarks together smoothly.
- The Scraper Engine: The entire point of the app is aggregation. Instead of relying on manual data entry, the backend is designed to scrape data from local Hamilton venue sites and ingest it directly into our database.
Looking Ahead: Future Enhancements
Because we invested heavily in a modular structure early on, Corkboard is primed for some major post-MVP upgrades. We structured the backend specifically so we can scale these features without a massive refactor:
- Advanced Web Scraping: Expanding our scraping pipelines to cover more underground venues and automate the entire event lifecycle.
- Geographic Features: Leveraging Expo's native location services and our Supabase backend to implement location-based sorting, so students can find the gigs closest to them right now.
- Payments Processing: By processing payments directly through the Corkboard application, it will become a seamless end-to-end experience. Working on a collaborative mobile project like this has given me a completely new perspective on clean directory structures, API design, and team-based development.