Reserve Now

Reserve Now is a native iOS application developed for UTS iOS App Development. It provides a streamlined reservation platform with separate interfaces for customers - who can browse, book, modify, and cancel reservations - and staff - who manage and track all incoming bookings through a dedicated dashboard.

Role

Solo Developer

Contributions

Built the complete application end-to-end in Swift using Xcode
Designed and implemented dual-role interface system (customer / staff workflows)
Integrated a SQL database for persistent reservation management
Used CocoaPods for dependency management

Technical Challenges

Talking to MySQL directly from iOS. Rather than stand up a backend for a three-week assignment, the iOS app drove a remote MySQL host through a third-party client library wrapped in Swift, executing queries and decoding returned row dictionaries. The tradeoff was latency — the free host sat in another continent, ~260-300ms per call — so the same layer kept a backup database config swappable.
Typed model with manual row decoding. Result rows decoded into typed domain objects through conditional casts, so the rest of the app worked against real types rather than raw dictionaries.
MVC layering that survived a mid-project pivot. Customer and staff screens were thin controllers over a shared model + database layer; when local-only booking logic was rewritten into live database calls in iteration 3, the controllers barely changed — only the data layer did.
Validation and business rules at the edges. Null and format checks ran before any insert; party-size validation auto-adjusted to remaining availability with a hard cap so a booking could never exceed a slot’s capacity.

Lessons Learned

Over-relied on direct database operations from the start. CocoaPods and oh-my-sql were adopted after testing alternatives, and integrating them late — paired with database configuration and version compatibility challenges — caused delays that should have been caught earlier.
Originally scoped as a team project, ended up solo after teammates stopped responding / working. Picked up all the work rather than letting the project stall — compressed the timeline but sharpened end-to-end ownership of the codebase, with every screen, query, and edge case passing through one pair of hands.

Source: GitHub