mabandla.
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BUILD · 0012026mobileLIVE
A rideshare, delivery and marketplace super-app for Zimbabwe and South Africa

Vaye

Four apps, two markets, one platform — rides, deliveries, marketplace and ops, all multi-currency from day one.

Vaye is a four-app super-platform built for the Zimbabwean and South African markets. A passenger app, a driver app, an internal admin ops centre and a single Express + MongoDB backend cover ridesharing, deliveries, a peer-to-peer marketplace and an integrated wallet — with currency, payment provider and locale all driven by the user's region rather than hardcoded.

ROLE
Lead full-stack engineer
TIMELINE
12 MO
TEAM
1
STATUS
LIVE
Vaye rider app dashboard showing a live trip on the map with the gold-on-navy Vaye brand

Problem

Most rideshare platforms in southern Africa are forks of products designed for a single hard-currency market. They assume one currency, one payment rail and one regulatory regime. Vaye had to ship into two markets at once — Zimbabwe (ZiG) and South Africa (ZAR) — with different payment providers, different phone-number formats, two distinct data-protection regimes (Zimbabwe DPA + POPIA), and operators who needed to run the whole thing from an office on an intranet rather than a cloud SaaS dashboard.

Approach

I built the platform as four discrete apps against one backend, sharing a typed contract:

  • Rider app (VayeExpoFrontFull) — Expo SDK 54 / React Native 0.81 / TypeScript. Reanimated worklets for animated trip cards, expo-secure-store for tokens, useReducer + Context for trip and auth state, battery-aware location tracking that throttles when stationary and ramps up during active rides.
  • Driver app (vaye-drive-buddy) — Vite + React + Capacitor 7. Background geolocation through the native plugin instead of web polling, offline action queue for ride accept/reject, large-target request modal with haptics + sound for incoming jobs.
  • Admin ops centre (mindful-prompt-maker-main) — Vite + TanStack Router + shadcn/ui. Built specifically to be hosted on internal IIS, intranet-only, with strict CSP, IP allow-list capability and a deploy script that refuses to ship a build pointed at localhost.
  • Backend (VayeBackend) — Express 5, Mongoose, Socket.IO, helmet, JWT, env-driven CORS allow-list, per-route rate limits, lean reads with compound indexes.

Multi-market support is enforced at the data layer: every monetary record stores a currency code alongside the amount, fare configuration and surge pricing are per-market, phone validation supports +263 and +27, and copy is locale-formatted. There is no place in the codebase where "ZAR" or "ZiG" is hardcoded as a default.

The admin centre was hardened for an internal-network deployment: a custom production web.config with HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options DENY, COOP/CORP, immutable asset cache, no-cache index.html and request filtering to block .env/.git/.map. A PowerShell deploy script validates env, builds, and mirrors dist/ to a UNC share via robocopy /MIR.

Outcome

  • Four apps shipping against one consistent typed API.
  • Real-time ride and delivery tracking with reconnect on flaky LTE.
  • Production security baseline: OWASP Top 10 audited, zero hardcoded secrets, env-driven CORS allow-list, JWT with separate admin signing key.
  • Admin dashboard goes from git pull to live IIS site in a single PowerShell command, with a sub-30-second rollback path.
  • Multi-currency, multi-locale architecture that didn't bolt on later — it was the first design decision.
PLATES

In detail.

01 — Overview
02 — Navigation
03 — Marketplace
04 — Security
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