boekhoek
a marketplace for secondhand books
the problem
the existing platforms for buying and selling secondhand books in the netherlands are clunky, overpriced, or buried inside general marketplace apps. boekhoek is a dedicated marketplace that makes it easy to find your next read and sell the ones you're done with — with built-in letterbox shipping so books actually arrive.
my role
i designed the app in figma, built the full ios app in swift/swiftui, and wrote the backend in bun with postgres. i also handled the myparcel integration for shipping labels and stripe for payments.
key decisions
swift & swiftui
native ios for the best user experience. swiftui made it fast to iterate on the ui while keeping things smooth and responsive.
bun + postgres on hetzner
lightweight and fast backend. hetzner keeps hosting costs low while bun handles requests efficiently. planetscale postgres for reliable data storage.
myparcel for letterbox shipping
books fit through a letterbox — no need to be home for delivery. myparcel integration generates shipping labels automatically.
tech stack
what i learned
building a two-sided marketplace taught me a lot about keeping scope tight. the biggest lesson was around shipping integration — what seems like a simple api call turns into edge case after edge case. i also learned that designing for trust matters more than designing for features when you're asking people to pay strangers for books.