PharMap

01

What the client needed, and what I built

When someone in Cameroon needs a medicine, they usually go from pharmacy to pharmacy or phone around. Stock information, where it exists at all, is often out of date, and there's no easy way to know which pharmacy to trust.

01 · Find

ProblemTo find a medicine, people go from pharmacy to pharmacy or phone around.

BuiltSearch by generic name or local brand name (Doliprane, Panadol) and see which pharmacies have it.

Plain PostgreSQL search: every word matched against name, generic and brand names, accents ignored, ranked by matches

02 · Trust

ProblemStock information is often out of date, and there's no easy way to know which pharmacy to trust.

BuiltEach pharmacy shows the price, the stock status and how recently it was updated. Only pharmacies checked by an admin are marked verified.

Verification is a state machine, and every status change is recorded in an audit trail

03 · Back in stock

ProblemWhen a medicine is out of stock, patients have to keep checking.

BuiltWhen a pharmacy marks it back in stock, the patients waiting for it are notified.

Notifications are written in the same database transaction as the stock change, so no one is missed

02

How it's built

I built PharMap as an installable web app (PWA) with a React frontend and a NestJS API. Patients search for a medicine and see which verified pharmacies have it, with the price and how recently the stock was updated. Pharmacies register themselves on a map and keep their inventory up to date. An admin verifies each pharmacy before it's shown as verified. It works in English and French.

Frontend

React + TypeScript + Vite + TailwindA fast, installable PWA. It's an app people log into, so it doesn't need server rendering.

Maps

Leaflet + OpenStreetMapFree, with no billing account or API key, and good place search for Cameroon.

Backend

NestJS + TypeScriptOne module per area (auth, medicines, pharmacies, reviews, notifications), with role checks enforced on the server.

Database

PostgreSQL (Neon) + PrismaPharmacies, stock, members and reviews are all linked, and stock updates need transactions.

Hosting

Vercel + Render (Docker)The web app on Vercel, the API on Render from its own Dockerfile. Free tiers that fit this app without losing features.

03

What was hard

• Search had to change to go live. It started on Meilisearch, but free hosting wipes the disk on restart, which deletes its index. I moved search into Postgres, trading typo tolerance for something that runs on the database we already have.
• Keeping notifications exact. When a pharmacy marks a medicine back in stock, waiting patients are notified in the same database transaction, so there's never a moment where stock says "in stock" and a subscriber was missed.
• Cold starts on free hosting. The database sleeps after 5 minutes and the API after 15, so deployments failed while the database woke up. A longer connection timeout fixed the deploys, and a scheduled ping keeps the API awake.
• One account, several roles. A person can be a patient and a pharmacy owner at the same time, so roles are worked out from their data instead of being stored as a single value.

04

Result

It's live as an MVP: the web app on Vercel, the API on Render and the database on Neon, with unit and end-to-end tests running on every push. The code is in a private repository.

05

Screens

8 screens · tap to enlarge